Glossary

Algorithmic trading,
defined in plain language.

Every term below describes mechanics only — how a thing works, not what you should do about it. No advice, no promises. If you spot something unclear, tell us at contact@stralines.com.

Basics

Bot: A set of rules that watches the market and places or protects trades for you, automatically.; A trading bot is software that reads market data, applies your rules for when to enter and exit, and sends orders to your exchange — with no manual click-through. In Stralines, every bot inherits stop-loss protection and audit logging by default.
Algorithmic trading: Placing trades from software rules rather than by hand.; Algorithmic (or 'algo') trading means the decision to enter or exit a position is made by a defined rule set — a script, an indicator, or a strategy — rather than a human clicking a button. The rule set can be simple ('cross the moving average') or complex (multi-condition regime-aware). It is not synonymous with 'high-frequency' — most algo trading is not HFT.
Backtest: Replaying a bot against past market history to see how it would have behaved.; A backtest runs a bot's rules against a fixed slice of historical market data — say, two years of Binance BTCUSDT — and reports what would have happened. It is a study of the past, not a prediction of the future. Realistic backtests include fees and slippage assumptions.
Paper trading: Running a bot on live prices with fake (or 'testnet') money, so you can watch behaviour without risk.; Paper trading (also called 'demo' or 'testnet' trading) runs your bot against real, current market prices but with synthetic funds. The same code path executes; only the venue is a testnet account. Stralines runs demo bots on the same engine as live bots, with full self-heal protection.

Order types

Market order: An order that fills immediately at the best available price.; A market order tells the exchange to execute right now, whatever the price. It guarantees a fill but not a price. Used when getting into (or out of) a position matters more than the specific level.
Limit order: An order that only fills at your specified price or better.; A limit order sits on the exchange's order book at the price you set, waiting for a taker. It guarantees the price but not a fill — the market may never reach your level.
Stop-loss (SL): A pre-set order that closes a position once it moves against you by a chosen amount.; A stop-loss is a protective order sitting on the exchange, triggered when the price crosses a threshold you set. It exits the position at market (stop-market) or a defined limit (stop-limit). Stralines re-places stop-losses that the exchange silently drops, via three independent recovery layers.
Take-profit (TP): A pre-set order that closes a position once it moves in your favour by a chosen amount.; A take-profit is the mirror of a stop-loss — an exchange-side order that closes the position when a favourable price is reached. Bots often use multiple take-profit legs (TP1 / TP2 / TP3) to scale out gradually rather than exit all at once.
ReduceOnly order: A flag telling the exchange this order can only reduce your position, never open a new one.; Setting reduceOnly on a stop-loss or take-profit protects against edge cases where the position is already partially closed — the exchange will refuse the order rather than accidentally opening a fresh position in the opposite direction.

Metrics

Win rate: The share of trades that closed profitably, expressed as a percent.; Win rate alone is a poor measure of a strategy — a 90% win rate with catastrophic losers is worse than a 40% win rate with tight losses and long winners. Always read win rate alongside average R:R and drawdown.
R:R (risk-to-reward): The ratio between how much you risk on a trade and how much you stand to make if it works.; R:R = distance to take-profit ÷ distance to stop-loss. An R:R of 2:1 means you're risking one unit to make two. Combined with win rate, R:R decides whether a strategy is positive-expectancy over a large sample.
Drawdown: How far an account falls from a previous high, measured in percent.; If your account peaks at ₹100,000 and later drops to ₹80,000, that is a 20% drawdown. Max drawdown (MDD) is the largest such drop over a period. Drawdown, not raw return, is usually what drives a trader to abandon a strategy prematurely.
Slippage: The difference between the price you expected to fill at and the price you actually got.; Slippage happens on market orders during volatile moments — by the time your order reaches the exchange and matches, the price has moved. Realistic backtests include a slippage assumption; ignoring it makes results look better than they'd be in practice.
Funding rate: A periodic fee exchanged between long and short holders on a perpetual futures contract.; Perpetual futures track a spot price via funding: every 8 hours (typically), longs pay shorts (or vice versa) a small rate to keep the contract price anchored. Held long enough, funding can materially affect a position's P&L.

Risk

Position sizing: How much capital you commit to a single trade.; Position sizing is the single largest driver of long-term account survival. Fixed-fractional sizing (e.g. 1% of equity risked per trade) is the standard baseline. In Stralines, position size is derived from the risk envelope you set once, not chosen per trade.
Risk envelope: The bundle of rules that caps how much a bot can lose per trade, per day, and in a row.; A risk envelope typically includes: max risk per trade, max daily loss, max consecutive losses before pause, and max concurrent open positions. Stralines enforces the envelope on every order — the bot cannot exceed it even if a signal says otherwise.
Circuit breaker: An automatic halt that pauses a bot when certain error or loss conditions trigger.; A circuit breaker stops a bot when something looks abnormal — the exchange is unreachable, spreads are unrealistic, consecutive losses hit a cap. Trading resumes only when a human clears the breaker.

Protection

Self-heal (three-layer): The mechanism that re-places stop-losses and take-profits the exchange has dropped.; Stralines's three-layer self-heal: (Layer 1) verifies every SL inline within seconds of placement; (Layer 2) a continuous 2-minute scanner walks every open position and re-places missing SL/TP orders; (Layer 3) a validator flips the protection flag when a previously-placed SL is later auto-purged. Independent layers cover independent failure modes.
Custody: Who holds your money. In Stralines, you do — the platform never does.; Custody means physical (or, on-chain, cryptographic) control over funds. Stralines never has custody: it holds no customer money, and cannot move funds because the exchange API keys it uses are scoped to read + trade, never withdraw.

Strategy

Smart Money Concepts (SMC): A trading framework that tries to identify where institutional order flow shifts market structure.; SMC focuses on structural signals — break-of-structure, change-of-character, order blocks, fair value gaps — rather than classical technical indicators. Many of Stralines's pre-built bots implement SMC-style entry rules with defined SL and TP logic.
Break of structure (BOS): A price move that breaks the previous swing high or swing low, signalling a continuation of trend.; In market-structure trading, a BOS is confirmation that the current trend is still in force — price broke through the prior high (in an uptrend) or prior low (in a downtrend). Often used as an entry trigger with a stop just beyond the broken level.
Order block: A price zone thought to hold significant institutional buy or sell orders, often where a reversal originated.; An order block is the candle range immediately before a strong impulsive move — the assumption being that large players filled positions there and will defend it on retest. Traders use it as a target level for entries and stops.
Fair value gap (FVG): A three-candle imbalance where price moved fast enough to leave an unfilled gap in the middle.; An FVG forms when the wick of candle 1 doesn't overlap the wick of candle 3, leaving candle 2's body as an untraded pocket. Some strategies expect price to revisit and fill FVGs as targets or entries.

Ops

Webhook: A URL that receives real-time notifications — used to send a trading signal from one system to another.; A webhook lets an external system (TradingView, a custom script, a signal provider) POST a message to a URL your bot listens on. Stralines exposes bot-specific webhook endpoints that validate incoming signals before acting on them.
Pine Script: TradingView's scripting language for writing indicators and strategies.; Pine Script (currently v5/v6) is how you encode a signal or indicator on TradingView. A common Stralines setup: write your logic in Pine, fire a TradingView alert on the signal, deliver the alert to a Stralines BYO webhook, and let Stralines handle order placement, SL/TP, and self-heal.
Idempotency: A property that lets the same request be safely retried without side-effects.; If the network drops and a signal is re-delivered, an idempotent handler recognises the duplicate and does not place a second order. Stralines uses idempotency keys on every signal so a retry never creates a second position.

See these concepts in action.

The Sandbox lets you run any bot against real Binance history — no signup — so you can see terms like drawdown, R:R, and win rate on real numbers instead of abstract definitions.

Open Sandbox → Browse Marketplace

Algorithmic trading,defined in plain language.