Match all or match any: how conditions combine
Caliente Signals · Updated
Match all means every condition in the rule has to be true on the same candle. Match any means one of them is enough.
Entry and exit each pick their own. An entry could require all three of its conditions while the exit fires on either of its two, if that is the strategy you want.
The choice changes how often the rule fires, and by a lot. Take three conditions that are each true about a fifth of the time. Matched any, the rule is true on a large share of candles. Matched all, it might fire twice a year.
Rarer is not the same as better
Every condition added to a match all rule makes it stricter, and it is easy to keep adding until the rule describes one specific afternoon in March.
You will see it in the backtest as the number of trades falling away. That number is not more important than the rest of the result, but it is the one that tells you how much the rest of the result is worth: a strong return over four trades and a strong return over eighty are very different claims.
So add conditions one at a time and read the whole result after each, the trade count included. A condition that improves the numbers while barely touching the count has earned its place. One that mainly removes trades has narrowed the evidence rather than the strategy.
Five conditions is the ceiling. It is not a target.
The first candles of any window
An indicator cannot produce a value until it has enough candles behind it. SMA(50) has nothing to say until the fiftieth close has arrived.
During that stretch, a condition built on it counts as not true. A match all rule therefore cannot fire, and a match any rule can still fire on its other conditions. In neither case does the missing value ever produce a signal, so nothing fires on an indicator that has not warmed up yet.
The backtest handles this for you by loading extra history before the window it reports on, so your results start with indicators already up and running.
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Caliente Signals is an alert tool, not an investment advisor. Nothing on this page is financial advice, and past performance is not indicative of future results.