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Let’s build a real strategy together: a 15-minute opening-range breakout on Micro Nasdaq (MNQ). The idea is simple and popular — many traders believe the first 15 minutes of the session hint at where the market wants to go for the rest of the day. We’ll describe it, read the backtest, then add one filter and watch the result change.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always test before you trade.

Open a new chat

Sign in at askfutures.com and start a new chat. If you haven’t started your trial yet, the quickstart covers sign-up in two steps.
The AskFutures new-chat screen

Describe the breakout in plain English

Type the idea exactly as you’d say it out loud:
Prompt
Buy Micro Nasdaq when price breaks above the first 15-minute high,
and exit if it closes back below the midpoint of that range
Send it. Notice what you didn’t specify — no bar size, no date range, no direction. AskFutures fills those in with sensible defaults and tells you what it assumed.

Read the strategy card

AskFutures turns your sentence into a precise, rule-based strategy. On the strategy card you’ll see it written out:
  • Market: Micro Nasdaq (MNQ)
  • Entry: buy when price breaks above the high of the first 15-minute range
  • Exit: close if price closes back below the midpoint of that range
  • Strategy Flow: a chart of the logic, so you can see the rules connect
Because this is a day-trading idea, AskFutures also adds an end-of-day exit — any open trade is closed at the session close rather than held overnight. That’s one of the assumptions it states for you.
The MNQ opening-range breakout strategy card

Read the backtest

AskFutures runs the strategy through a fixed, deterministic backtest over the last year of real 1-minute prices and shows you the equity curve plus the headline numbers — net of modeled slippage (1 tick) and commission. The equity curve is your at-a-glance read: a line drifting up means the rule made money over the period; chop or a slide downward tells you the opposite.
Backtest results for the MNQ opening-range breakout
These results are hypothetical and simulated — no real trades were placed, and simulated programs are designed with the benefit of hindsight. Past performance, actual or simulated, does not guarantee future results. Always test before you trade.

Refine it with one sentence

Here’s the part that makes AskFutures feel like a conversation. The thinking: a small opening range might just be noise, while a large range can signal stronger intent — so maybe we only want to trade the bigger ranges. Tell it so, in plain English:
Refinement
Trade only if the opening range is over $400
Send it. AskFutures adds the filter — keeping the same entry and exit — and saves it as a new version, then reruns the backtest automatically. The new equity curve appears beside the old one so you can judge whether the filter actually helped.
Backtest after adding the opening-range size filter

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What you learned

In a few sentences you built a complete strategy, backtested it on real data, and refined it — without writing a single line of code. The AI only translated your words into rules; every number came from the same deterministic engine, so the same rules on the same data always produce the same result. That’s the whole loop: describe, strategy, backtest, iterate. From here you can keep going — add a stop, widen the date range, swap MNQ for a different market, or optimize the $400 threshold to see which value held up best.

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Next steps

Iterate and refine

More phrasing patterns for changing a strategy by chatting.

Run and read a backtest

How to read the equity curve and the metrics that matter.

Version and compare

Stack your versions and compare before and after.

Is the backtest real?

Why these numbers are an honest replay, not a guess.