You may recall in SlopeRules‘ brief lifetime that I’ve made the comparison between it and the first word processor. The first release we created, Version 0.1, was sort of like a word processor that couldn’t save or print. We improved it enough afterward to get it to the “it can save files” point.
I am delighted today to announce that we’re at the “it can print, too!” stage. That is, this thing is actually getting much more powerful. Now it can share.
The notion of “sharing” in SlopeRules is like a two-sided coin. You can share any SlopeRules set you’ve created with the entire community of Slopers. You can also, on the flip side, copy any SlopeRules which others have made public. The community as a whole contributes to the rule sets available and, over time, can help each other build out superior algorithms.
It all begins with a single button at the bottom of the SlopeRules dialog box: Share. Clicking this permits you to share the selected SlopeRules with everyone else on the Slope of Hope (It should be noted that the companion button, Library, provides an instant view to all the shared rule sets that have been made available by others).
After you click Share, a dialog box appears asking you to provide a description of the rule set. It is not required that you fill this out, but it is often helpful to provide information about the thinking behind your creation, since the name alone is rarely descriptive enough. Once you are ready to publish the selected SlopeRules, click Done.
At that point, that one specific SlopeRules set is visible to others on the system. It is important to note that others cannot alter your SlopeRules. They can only copy its definition at the time you published it. Afterward, they may modify their own copy at their discretion, leaving your original SlopeRules undisturbed.
To see the library of SlopeRules, you can either click the Library button (mentioned above) or right-click anywhere on SlopeCharts and choose this menu item:
Now you can see all the published rule sets, both yours and everyone else’s. The columns shown are the SlopeRules names, the user who created each one, whether it is a Long or a Short, the description (if any), and a button. The button will either be Copy (if someone else published it, allowing you to copy that rule into your own database) or Unpublish (if you own it and have decide to make it private again).
There is also a very important button at the bottom of this dialog box called Test, which lets you instantly test all the SlopeRules using the symbol of your choices.
After you click Test, you will have an opportunity to enter a stock symbol you would like to use for the testing (or just use the default SPY). Extra columns will be shown quantifying the percentage of winning trades, the overall gain or loss from each SlopeRules set, the average profit for winners, and the average loss for losers. You can sort based on any of these columns by clicking the column name.
The ability to share and copy SlopeRules within the Slope of Hope community provides everyone a better opportunity to both learn and profit.
One bit of slightly bummer news: for those of you who experimented with SlopeRules early on, I’m afraid we had to delete those rulesets, since the requirements of all these improvements made them outdated. It won’t happen again, but……….ya gotta start from scratch! But I consider us about “Version 0.8” at this point, so you should be able to make rule sets with confidence from here on out.
