Bear with me, I just started...

My simple, rule-based crossover strategy is not working

Details:

Strategy: short index when 40 EMA dips below 200 EMA & when 4 dips below 20. Then Close the short when the 4 EMA is above the 20 EMA, as long as the 40 is below 200.

I used the rules section of the strategy windows:

Short at market
(Fast Moving Average crosses below slow moving average - 40 below 200 EMA), (fast moving average crosses below slow moving average 4 below 20)
Cover at market (fast moving average is above slow moving average - 4 above 20).

This was run on ^NDX (nasdaq 100) daily, data range all data.

Performance returned 1 trade only when there were more I found manually.

I tried to use sell before buy (instead of short, cover) but with same results.

What am I doing wrong?

Adi, welcome to the forum.

The typical cause of the problem could be found in this FAQ | Strategies and WealthScript > Alerts are not triggered:

QUOTE:
Even if you're in Raw Profit mode, with "Fixed Dollar" selected trades can be skipped if the dollar size is less than the basis price of the instrument. It frequently happens when backtesting higher-priced indexes in RP mode. Example: Fixed Dollar = $5,000, Index price = 10,000, trade can't be taken (out of money).

So for example, with $10,000 per position (even in Raw Profit mode) one cannot trade ^N225 (1 "share" is priced well above 20K now), ^NYA, ^MXX (over 40K) etc. from your DataSet.

Despite this affects your system, in your case the reason for not getting trades is more prosaic: the chosen combination of entry conditions is very rare. For example, in a Dow 30 backtest spanning over 40 years only 25 trades have occurred. Removing the 4/20 crossover from the entry block gets me 953 trades. (Keep in mind that conditions are ANDed together!)