Strategy Overview

StreetSmart Pro® offers a comprehensive suite of tools that work in concert to assist in providing a more user-friendly approach to technical analysis than is often found in institutional trading software. If you use trading strategies based on technical analysis principles or if you are interested in using back testing as part of your stock selection process, the following tools aim to facilitate your efforts:

Strategy Center - At the heart of the Strategy tools is the Strategy Center, where you create, save, and manage all the strategies you use in the Strategy tools. A strategy consists of one or more indicators (such as a price crossover on Bollinger Bands®, Moving Average, Envelope, etc.) with an associated trade action (such as Long Entry, Short Exit, etc).

The information you get from each strategy depends on what tool you apply it in. For example, applying a strategy in the Strategy Tester tool or in a Chart will apply the strategy for a certain period of time going backwards to see how well the selected strategy would have performed historically for a stock or list of stocks. Whereas in the Strategy Ticker and Strategy Matrix, the strategies are applied to real-time data in order to flag occurrences of the selected strategy crossing whatever threshold is set by the strategy.

The Strategy Center is accessible from any of the Strategy tools or from your Charts.

Strategy Tester - Provides the ability to search through historical performance results of back-tested technical strategies.  It can help you identify the following:

• Best performing Securities for a given Technical Strategy and Bar Size
• Best performing combination of multiple Securities, Technical Strategies, and Bar Sizes
• Best 50 performing Technical Strategies for a Security and Bar Size

Stock symbols and price and volume data shown here and in the software are for illustrative purposes only. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., its parent or affiliates, and/or its employees and/or directors may have positions in securities referenced herein, and may, as principal or agent, buy from or sell to clients.

Charts - Visualize your back testing entry and exit points for individual positions in your charts. The Charts tool has the same strategies available to it as the Strategy tools, and many of the studies in the Charts can be viewed in concert with the corresponding Strategy to help you identify what triggered each trade.

EXAMPLE  In the image below, we have a Bollinger Band® study along with a strategy utilizing a Bollinger Band indicator. You can see where the closing price of any 15 minute bar crosses over the lower line, an entry is triggered, and where it crosses above the top line, the position is exited.

Stock symbols and price and volume data shown here and in the software are for illustrative purposes only. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., its parent or affiliates, and/or its employees and/or directors may have positions in securities referenced herein, and may, as principal or agent, buy from or sell to clients.

Strategy Performance Details - For the historical testing tools like the Strategy Tester and Charts, Performance Details provide a wealth of data for each stock and strategy combination being tested. It not only summarizes all the data collected in the process of the test, such as performance percentages, buy & hold performance stats, winning/losing trade stats, hold times, etc., but it also breaks down each execution, each round trip trade, and tracks equity history.

You can even change your Strategy Tester settings (i.e. changing the estimated commission per trade, quantity per trade, initial equity, period for the test, etc.) to see immediately how they affect the bottom line in the test.

Stock symbols and price and volume data shown here and in the software are for illustrative purposes only. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., its parent or affiliates, and/or its employees and/or directors may have positions in securities referenced herein, and may, as principal or agent, buy from or sell to clients.

Strategy Matrix™ - The Strategy Matrix tool lets you monitor technical strategies for individual securities or indexes crossing thresholds specified by the strategies being monitored.

Stock symbols and price and volume data shown here and in the software are for illustrative purposes only. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., its parent or affiliates, and/or its employees and/or directors may have positions in securities referenced herein, and may, as principal or agent, buy from or sell to clients.

Strategy Ticker® - The Strategy Ticker tool monitors the entire market and/or a defined set of equity or index symbols in real-time for triggers against specific technical strategies.

Once you have established one or more strategies to use in your trading, the Strategy Ticker and Matrix tools will help identify opportunities based on those strategies using real-time data.

Stock symbols and price and volume data shown here and in the software are for illustrative purposes only. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., its parent or affiliates, and/or its employees and/or directors may have positions in securities referenced herein, and may, as principal or agent, buy from or sell to clients.