Build Alpha

Checked October 2026

Build Alpha generates strategies and runs more than a dozen robustness tests, including Monte Carlo and a walk-forward matrix. There is no trial, it is Windows only, and options are not included. Backtoast is first if you want to test one strategy and get paid from real trading when it passes.

1Backtoast

You pay $99 for two full tests of your own strategy, and a pass is an offer of 30% of the profit Backtoast makes trading it with its own money.

2Build Alpha

It covers futures, forex, stocks, ETFs, crypto and CFDs, and delisted stocks are in the database. You pick signals from its library and a genetic algorithm combines them into strategies, with Python if you want a signal of your own, and the result exports as code for TradeStation, MultiCharts, NinjaTrader, MetaTrader 4 and 5, TradingView and Python for Interactive Brokers. Version 3.1, from August 2026, connects ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other models to steer that search and write new signals, with your own API key and no markup. The founder came from a high-frequency trading desk and still runs it.

StrategyQuant is the other generator here, with real-tick tests and nine kinds of Monte Carlo.

Testing

Futures come with daily bars back to each contract's start and 1-minute bars back to 2006 for more than 30 markets, and you can import tick data or other bars from a CSV file. Slippage and commission are set per contract or as a share of notional value. Besides walk-forward, which re-fits the rules on one window and tests them on the next, and Monte Carlo, the robustness tests include out-of-sample and randomized out-of-sample splits, a noise test that adds random noise to the prices, delayed entries, liquidity, synthetic data and comparisons against random strategies.

Pricing

The licensing page says $1,497 is the whole cost, with no monthly or annual fee and every upgrade included, and instead of a trial there are demo videos and a live demo on request. On a Mac it runs inside a virtual machine such as Parallels or VMware.

Facts are from Build Alpha's own pages, checked 23 and 31 October 2026.