Long rules in green, short rules in red — direction at a glance

A surprising amount of the time a trader spends in a rule editor goes to one question: "is this rule about the long side or the short side?" When you're auditing a long-only strategy, every rule is long-side — the question doesn't come up. But the moment you build a strategy that handles both directions, the answer matters on every line.

We made it obvious. As of this release, every rule in the Strategy Designer is colour-coded by direction:

• Green — long side. The rule contributes to long entries or long exits only.
• Red — short side. The rule contributes to short entries or short exits only.
• Neutral — both sides. The rule applies to whichever side the surrounding strategy is evaluating.

Same colour code in Block mode and in Drag-and-Drop mode. Same colour code on the strategy-configuration page of the Trade-Chart PDF. Same convention you already know from buy / sell candles, so there's nothing new to learn.

Why this matters in practice

A mixed long/short strategy might have an entry block that reads, in plain text:

(Long - EMA20 greater than 30)
AND
((Long - rsi14 less than 70) OR (Short - rsi14 greater than 30))

Without colour, your eyes have to parse "Long" or "Short" on every leaf to follow the logic. With colour, the long-only branch reads as one solid green block, the short-only branch as one solid red block, and you can scan the structure in one glance. On a 12-rule mixed strategy, that's the difference between "I trust this" and "I'll just trust the previous version, thanks."

Bonus fix: Block-mode AND/OR flips work first try

If you've spent any time in Block mode, you may have noticed an annoying bug: clicking the AND/OR toggle on a group sometimes refused to switch, and the workaround was to jump to Drag-and-Drop, flip there, and come back. That's fixed. AND/OR toggles, direction selectors, and the NOT toggle all respond on the first click now, in every editor mode. Cross-mode synchronisation — change something in Drag-and-Drop, see it reflected in Block — also still works.

Small fix individually, big one in aggregate. Every wasted click on a group toggle adds friction to the iteration loop, and the iteration loop is most of what differentiates a strategy that converges from one that doesn't.

Where to see it

Open any saved strategy in the Strategy Designer, switch to Block mode if it's not already, and look at any leaf with a direction tag. The card border carries the long/short colour. If the strategy is mixed, the next pass over it should feel noticeably faster.

Trying it on a fresh strategy? The default template starts with long-side rules only — add a short-side leaf to see the red treatment.