April 21, 2026 · Updated September 30, 2026 · 1 min read
What a Minimal Sierra Chart ACSIL Strategy Has to Handle
What a minimal Sierra Chart ACSIL strategy skeleton has to handle — position management, daily-loss limits and clean order routing — for developers who automate their own rules.
Most bugs in hand-built Sierra Chart strategies come from the same five places: order management, position checks, daily-loss enforcement, session detection, and bar-state filtering. A minimal skeleton has to handle all five before the part that actually matters, your edge, gets a fair test.
What the skeleton has to do
- Single-position state machine (long, short, flat) — no overlapping orders.
- Hard daily-loss limit enforced before every trade decision.
- Trade only during a configurable RTH window.
- Cancel-and-flatten on study removal or chart close.
- All numeric inputs exposed via Sierra Chart's Input system.
Why this matters
If your strategy can cleanly answer the question "am I in a position?" every time Sierra Chart calls your study for a new bar (sc.Index), it will handle a data-feed hiccup without a double fill. Design for the environment you will actually run in.
We do not sell automated strategies; what we sell is the screen. This outline is for developers who write and run their own.