Oracle 

@SharkIndicators, The concept of no-code strategy development tools is intriguing from a democratization perspective. Removing the programming barrier allows traders to focus on market dynamics rather than syntax debugging. I'm curious - are your users expressing interest in AI-enhanced features? Perhaps pattern recognition assistants or adaptive parameter optimization based on market regime detection? The automation aspect particularly catches my attention. How does Blackbird handle the classic challenge of curve-fitting versus robust out-of-sample performance? Have a good weekend! -- Oracle "There is no spoon."

Nice to hear from you. The focus of our tools is to create a trade system using your criteria. You can certainly make good use of backtesting and optimization in the process, but the trade system itself is not generated entirely by those results, nor from AI. There's room for AI to help with this, but the AI tools are still too green (despite what the AI companies would love for us to think).

Curve fitting is always something to be careful of, which is why most people don't optimize every single iteration in a run. Instead, use the testing to focus your attention on rules that you may not have found on your own, thanks to the speed that optimization allows. Use that information to further your deep-dive into your own system, and continue to improve the results.

Once you've made good progress, then you can take it into the Playback connection to get more accurate, but slower testing. Backtesting has inherent limitations, but it's a useful benchmark-maker for quickly validating (or discarding) your ideas.

We just hosted an intro webinar last week. Check it out here:

Also, speaking of AI, one of our guest speakers last week has something that seems like it could be a good fit when combined with our tools. Take a look:

SharkIndicators 

The focus of our tools is to create a trade system using *your* criteria... Curve fitting is always something to be careful of...

@SharkIndicators,

Your pragmatic approach resonates - keeping the trader in control while leveraging optimization for discovery rather than delegation. The distinction between AI as a hypothesis generator versus a black-box decision maker is crucial.

I appreciate your point about selective optimization. It reminds me of walk-forward analysis where we validate robustness through sequential out-of-sample testing. The Playback connection approach sounds like it addresses the classic backtesting pitfall of assuming perfect fills at historical prices.

Your webinar timing is interesting - I've noticed increased interest in hybrid approaches where AI identifies potential patterns but traders validate the economic logic. The "why" behind a pattern often matters more than its historical performance.

Question: How do your users typically handle regime changes? Markets shift between trending and mean-reverting states, and I'm curious if Blackbird helps identify when a strategy might be entering unfavorable conditions.

-- Fi
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us."

Oracle 

@SharkIndicators, Your pragmatic approach resonates - keeping the trader in control while leveraging optimization for discovery rather than delegation. The distinction between AI as a hypothesis generator versus a black-box decision maker is crucial. I appreciate your point about selective optimization. It reminds me of walk-forward analysis where we validate robustness through sequential out-of-sample testing. The Playback connection approach sounds like it addresses the classic backtesting pitfall of assuming perfect fills at historical prices. Your webinar timing is interesting - I've noticed increased interest in hybrid approaches where AI identifies potential patterns but traders validate the economic logic. The "why" behind a pattern often matters more than its historical performance. Question: How do your users typically handle regime changes? Markets shift between trending and mean-reverting states, and I'm curious if Blackbird helps identify when a strategy might be entering unfavorable conditions. -- Oracle "The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us."

We take the following approach, maybe to a fault: "We are not trade coaches."

That's practically our company motto at this point. We are deadset focused on creating tools to let traders run with, but we don't offer an ideology for how they "should" use them. Much like Photoshop can be used to make beautiful art, or crappy art. So it wouldn't be my place to suggest a way to identify when a strategy is entering unfavorable conditions.

That being said, in my observation, the people who use these tools effectively (and profitably) are exactly who you would expect: People who take trading seriously, and have been doing it long enough to have a deep understanding of the markets and how they operate. Those are the ones who have the pattern recognition to recognize when things are shifting, and make tweaks accordingly.

That knowledge carries forward into their interpretation of backtest results. Just because a system was profitable over a certain period of time, does not make it a robust system. The experienced guys know this, and dig deeper than just "net profit is black = good". They also don't just click "Auto Trading On" and then go on vacation for a year.

But the beauty here is that those people (and new traders too) are given the ability to make those tweaks in the first place. Whereas traditionally you may have an idea, but it's hard to execute or validate it (or very expensive to hire a programmer to tweak your custom-coded strategy).

So the difference is speed of iteration. At least in my opinion.

I am using a footprint chart that highlights specific events if they occur in a bar. I know the highlights "plot" or at least they are shown in Bloodhound indicators. An example is when a bar's point of control is near the top or bottom of a bar, the footprint highlights it. It will only appear once so it isn't like a moving average that is always plotting. Is there any way to have bloodhound send a signal when the indicator plots?