Simple strategy, seemingly complex solution.

[J2theR]

Need a bit of help or at least someone put eyes on my code (shown below). Appreciate any suggestions. Embarrassed to admit have already spent over 30 hours on this. Thanks in advance!

Background: I'm well versed in TOS but recently started coding with thinkscript to check strategies.

Goal: With this strategy, I want to look at entering a long or short position when the price moves a predefined distance from its price at a certain time of day. Then once I enter a trade, execute an OCO bracket set at predefined limit/stop. Seems pretty straightforward, but am getting errors. I also want to evaluate this strat at the longest possible timeframe (at least a year) and make trade entry/exit decisions on the shortest possible timeframe (1 min or less).

Test environment: Using onDemand of course and set most of my variables to plot so I can debug.

Errors/Challenges:

1. It seems that if I use the 1 min timeframe for evaluating price to trigger the trade, I can't increase my chart timeframe to evaluate P&L on the strat. When I increase timeframe, the strat doesn't appear to run. I did read that TOS won't let you add data from smaller timeframes to larger timeframes on charts, but evaluating P&L's on larger timeframes must be do-able for strategies that depend on small timeframes to trigger actions.

 

[mashume]

And now for an even more complex solution:

For back testing something like this over the timeframe you're envisioning ToS is not going to make you a happy camper. You'd be better served working on some python code.
Some pre-built options for tools are:
https://pypi.org/project/Backtesting/
and a big rundown here:
https://www.qmr.ai/best-backtesting-library-for-python/

Of course, you can't readily get a year of 1m data out of ThinkOrSwim. You can (or could -- don't know the current state) get 7 days of 1m from Yahoo Finance (look for yfinance for python) and up to 60 days of 5m data.

You can buy data from 3rd party brokers, or use some of the 'export' scripts from this site to get data out of ToS and into a spreadsheet.

The basics are that, while your strategy is simple to describe, writing code to do it is not an easy thing. And while you're at it, python will allow you to test a variety of parameters for tuning your strategy.

There are many good user groups out there that can help you with this, including a few of us around here.

Good luck, and let us know what you decide to do and how it goes.
-mashume