The Strategy Designer is where the pieces come together. A Strategy here is one document with a fixed set of slots β fill each slot and you have a complete, mechanical system with nothing left in your head.
Entry and triggers
The entry slot holds the rule tree β the setup, tagged by Long / Short. The optional trigger slot adds the confirmation stage per direction. If you leave the trigger empty, entries open on the next bar; fill it and the engine waits for the confirmation event first.
Exit, stop, and target
The exit slot is another rule tree for rule-based closes. Separately, the stop defines where you are wrong. A Structural stop anchors to the market β for example anchor: signal_candle with a lookback places it at the deepest bar of the pullback window β rather than a flat percentage. The target is often an R-multiple: anchor: r_multiple, r: 3.0 exits at three times the distance from entry to stop.
Risk sizing
The position sizing slot turns a signal into a size. In risk_based mode you set risk_per_trade_pct β say 1% of equity risked between entry and stop β and the engine computes the size from your stop distance. This is Position sizing done right: the same dollar risk per trade regardless of how tight or wide the stop is.
Why a stop and sizing come first, before any thought of reward, is the whole argument of the Risk before reward lesson. The Designer makes that discipline structural β you cannot ship a strategy without saying where the stop goes.
Reflection
Open one of your strategies and check: is every slot filled with a rule, or is some of it still 'I'll decide in the moment'? The empty slots are where your backtest and your live results will disagree.