Composer.Trade Review – How Effective Is This Platform?

Composer.Trade is a powerful platform for building and backtesting stock trading and investing strategies. The visual strategy editor eliminates the need for coding and offers a lot of flexibility. You can also copy or modify hundreds of strategies created by the Composer team or other users.

Building and backtesting strategies with Composer.Trade is completely free. You only need to pay if you want Composer to execute your strategy automatically.

Keep reading our Composer.Trade review to find out if this platform is right for you.

Composer.Trade Pricing Options

Composer.Trade’s Free plan gives you nearly full access to the platform’s tools. You can build, edit, and backtest an unlimited number of strategies. There are no premium strategies or conditionals that free users can’t access.

The main limitation of the Free plan is that you cannot put your trading strategy into action. The Pro plan enables automated trading through Alpaca for $30 per month or $288 per year. Trades are commission-free, although you must pay regulatory fees for every trade.

There is no minimum deposit required to open an Alpaca trading account. However, Composer.Trade recommends starting with a minimum of $2,500.

You can try out Composer’s Pro plan free for 14 days.

Composer.Trade Features

Symphonies

In Composer.Trade, trading strategies are called symphonies. You can browse dozens of symphonies created by Composer’s team as well as other Composer.Trade users. If you find a symphony you like, you can save it to your dashboard to keep an eye on how it performs.

Clicking on any symphony will bring up details about its performance and trading rules. You can view backtested performance over any custom period. Historical data extends as far back as 1990. Composer offers a performance chart to which you can add benchmarks like the S&P 500, NASDAQ, or a specific stock or ETF. A table shows the symphony’s annualized return, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown.

Symphony Editor

Composer.Trade’s editor enables you to build your own symphonies or copy and modify any existing symphonies. It’s a no-code visual editor that uses conditionals and triggers to help you create an automated trading strategy.

You can create triggers based on price, return over a custom timeframe, moving averages, or RSI. When creating conditions to buy or sell, you can also choose to weight positions in your portfolio equally, based on market cap, according to specific amounts, or based on volatility. 

Your strategy can sell Composer which specific stocks and ETFs to invest in, or you can create lists of stocks and have it choose which ones to buy or sell based on performance. You can also choose whether the conditions of your symphony should be evaluated daily, weekly, or monthly.

Overall, the editor is very user-friendly. The variety of trigger conditions might not be wide enough for some traders – you can’t create triggers based on any technical indicators other than moving averages and RSI – but it’s very easy to stack multiple and/or conditions.

You can backtest your symphony from within the editor view, which makes it easy to see how changes impact your historical return. However, Composer.Trade doesn’t run any sensitivity analysis, so there can be a lot of trial and error in perfecting strategies.

Automated Trading

Pro users can set Composer.Trade to automatically execute trades based on their symphonies. All trades are executed through the brokerage Alpaca with no commissions. Trades are executed in batches between 3pm and 4pm each trading day. Most stocks and ETFs can be traded as fractional shares.

You can view your current portfolio through Composer and see which symphonies positions resulted from. You also have the option to place manual market orders, although these must be placed prior to 3pm for them to be executed during the current trading day.

Opus

Opus is an actively managed trading strategy created by the Composer team that offers investors the option to use Composer.Trade like a robo-advisor platform. There are three versions of Opus that range from conservative to aggressive. It’s best suited for Pro users since Opus’s trading rules will automatically rebalance your portfolio as conditions change.

Composer.Trade Platform Differentiators

Composer.Trade isn’t the only no-code strategy backtester available. Platforms like TrendSpider, BacktestZone, and Tradewell all offer similar visual editors that you can use to build automated trading strategies.

What’s unique about Composer is that its backtesting platform is completely free. You can build and backtest strategies at no cost. You only need to pay if you want to automate your strategy execution.

Another nice aspect of Composer is that you’re not left on your own to create a strategy from scratch. There are dozens of premade strategies available to copy, and you’re free to modify any of them to suit your needs.

What Type of Trader is Composer.Trade Best For?

Composer.Trade is best for swing traders and active investors. The no-code backtesting tools are a great option for evaluating your trading strategy and optimizing it. You can run multiple strategies simultaneously, which is a plus for traders who want to do a mix of swing trading and medium-term investing. Newer traders can also use Composer to discover new strategies to copy and make their own.

You can get a lot of out Composer without paying for the Pro plan, but the paid subscription is necessary if you want to automate your trading strategy. At $30 per month, this subscription can easily pay for itself after just a couple trades each month.

Trades are executed during a window at the end of each trading day and the minimum timeframe for re-evaluating your symphony’s triggers is one day. So, it’s not really possible for intraday traders to use Composer.Trade effectively.