Glossary

Glossary

Terms specific to Axiom Strategy Lab Pro. Definitions are in plain language — no jargon in the definitions themselves.

Allocation percent — The share of position size assigned to a single entry or exit, expressed as a percentage. For entries, it controls how much equity goes into the trade. For exits, it controls how much of the open position the exit closes.

Anchor quantity — The peak open position size observed for an entry group while it was open. Exit allocation percentages are calculated against this number, not the current open quantity. This makes exit sizing consistent regardless of the order in which exit legs fill.

Circuit breaker — A risk control that halts all new entries when a threshold is exceeded. The four circuit breakers are: max strategy drawdown, max consecutive loss days, max intraday loss, and max intraday filled orders. They stop further entries after damage has occurred — they do not prevent the initial damage. The halt is silent: no alert, no popup, no visible indicator beyond the absence of new trades.

Confirmation — A delay requirement that forces a condition to remain true for a specified number of bars or ticks before it takes effect. Setups and entries can both have confirmation. It is a persistence filter: it prevents acting on conditions that flash true for a single bar and disappear.

Cooldown — A waiting period after a setup cancel or reset during which the setup cannot re-activate. Measured in bars. Prevents rapid re-entry after a setup failure.

Expression — A human-readable condition string that the engine compiles and evaluates each bar. Expressions reference token names and use operators like &&, ||, >, and < to produce a boolean (true/false) or numeric result. Every gate, trigger, activation, and cancellation in the YAML is an expression. See Expression Reference for the full syntax.

Gate condition — A prerequisite expression that must be true before a setup or entry can proceed to its primary logic. Think of it as a filter applied before the main signal. If the gate is false, the trigger is never checked.

Intent — The engine's internal representation of a single entry, take profit, or stop loss defined in your YAML. Each intent tracks its own runtime state: inactive, waiting, or active, plus execution counters and latches.

Latching (price latching) — The behavior where a limit or stop price is captured once (when the trigger first fires) and held constant for the lifetime of the working order. Without latching, the price recalculates every bar.

OCA group (One-Cancels-All) — A set of orders that are coordinated so that when one fills, it affects the others. In this tool, exits use OCA.reduce groups: when one exit leg fills, it reduces the available quantity for the remaining legs in the group rather than cancelling them outright.

One-shot — The default entry mode. A one-shot entry fires once per setup activation and does not re-submit while it has an open trade or a trigger latch set. To allow repeated entries, disable one-shot and configure pyramiding.

Position cycle — The period from when a position opens (or changes direction) to when it closes or reverses. When the position changes sign (flat to long, long to short, long to flat, etc.), a new cycle begins. All exit-leg tracking, anchored quantities, filled-leg maps, and intent states reset at the boundary. This means exits from the previous cycle do not carry over — each cycle starts clean.

Pyramiding — Allowing multiple concurrent open trades from the same entry or across entries. The pyramiding setting in the Properties tab limits the total concurrent trades the tester will accept. Per-entry pyramiding is controlled by the oneShot and pyramidingMaxAdds fields.

Schema — The structured format of the YAML that the engine expects. The schema defines which fields exist, which are required, and what values are valid. If the YAML does not match the schema, the engine rejects it with a validation error. See YAML Reference for every field in every section.

Setup — A conditional gating layer that controls when entries are allowed to evaluate. Named setups follow a three-state lifecycle (INACTIVE → CONFIRMING → CONFIRMED). The _ACTIVE token is a convenience boolean meaning "not INACTIVE." The implicit GLOBAL setup is always confirmed.

Token — A named value that the expression engine can reference. Built-in tokens include prices (PRICE_CLOSE), bar data (BAR_INDEX), strategy statistics (STRATEGY_EQUITY), and position state (POSITION_ACTIVE). Custom tokens connect external indicator outputs to the expression language. See Default Tokens for the complete reference.

Trigger condition — The primary signal expression for an entry or exit. When the trigger (and its gate, if any) evaluates to true, the engine proceeds to order construction and submission. This is the "fire" condition.