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Your first strategy in five minutes

You'll build a classic EMA crossover, backtest it on real costs, and export it — all without writing a line of code.

1. Open the builder

When you open StrategyNodes you get three areas:

  • The chart (top-left) — candles for whatever symbol + timeframe you pick.
  • The node editor (bottom) — the canvas where you wire your strategy.
  • The Tester panel (right) — where backtests run and results land.

Every new strategy starts with one block already placed: the Tester (your backtest sink).

2. Add a data source

Every strategy needs price bars. Open the block palette (the + button or press ++slash++), find Data Source (OHLCLoader) and drop it on the canvas. Pick your symbol and timeframe — forex, stocks or crypto.

Tip: most blocks can take their bars from <Primary> — the symbol you're charting — so the same strategy follows whatever you switch the chart to. See Core concepts.

3. Add two moving averages

From the palette, drop two EMA blocks. Wire the data source's bars output into each EMA's Source input. Set one EMA's Period to 20 (fast) and the other to 50 (slow).

4. Turn them into a signal

Drop a Crosses Above block. Wire the fast EMA into its first input and the slow EMA into its second. Now you have a true/false signal: "the fast EMA just crossed above the slow one."

5. Wire it to the Tester

Connect the crossover signal into the Tester's Buy / entry input. (Add a Crosses Below the same way for exits, or let the Tester's stop-loss / take-profit handle it.) Set your risk in the Tester panel — account size, risk per trade, spread.

6. Run the backtest

Hit Run backtest. In a second or two the Tester fills with your equity curve, drawdown, trade list and the full metrics pack — on real spreads and slippage, so it's the result you'd actually have traded.

7. Stress-test it

A single backtest isn't proof. Open the Robustness tab and run Monte-Carlo, walk-forward and cross-market tests. If your edge only existed on this one slice of history, this is where you'll see it. → Robustness & the Score

8. Export it

Happy with it? Open Export to code (++cmd+k++ → "Export"). Pick TradingView (Pine) or MetaTrader (MQL5), copy or download the source, and paste it into your platform. It's yours — no lock-in. → Exporting

That's the whole loop: build → prove → export. From here, dig into the block library to see everything you can build with.