Why I Built JoNeTree

I had a job, a TradingView account, and about forty minutes a day to watch a chart that needed watching all day.

I was trading on TradingView the way most people start: manually, on my own screen, watching for the setups I'd learned to recognise. It worked, in the sense that I could point to trades that made money. It didn't work in the sense that mattered, which is that I had a job.

A trading setup doesn't wait for lunch break. Either I was watching the chart when it happened, or I wasn't, and for most of the day I wasn't. On the days I was, I still had to fight the other problem, which is that I am not naturally the most disciplined trader alive. I'd second-guess a stop-loss. I'd close a winner early because it felt good to bank the profit. I'd hold a loser too long because closing it felt like admitting I was wrong. None of that is a strategy problem. It's a me problem, and it costs money exactly like a strategy problem does.

So I went looking for a way to take myself out of the decision. Not out of building the strategy — out of executing it in the moment, which is where discipline actually gets tested and where mine kept failing.

Webhooks, and a strategy I didn't write

That search led to webhooks — the mechanism that lets a TradingView alert fire an HTTP request the instant a condition is met, with no human in the loop to hesitate. If I could get a Pine Script strategy to fire a webhook, and get something on the other end of that webhook to place the order, the discipline problem stopped being a discipline problem. The computer doesn't get attached to a losing trade.

I didn't know Pine Script. I found a YouTube video walking through a simple EMA crossover — 5-period against 15-period, buy when the fast one crosses above the slow one, sell when it crosses back — and used Gemini to turn the idea into working Pine Script. Half an hour later I had a strategy. It compiled. It drew signals on the chart. It felt like I'd built something.

I hadn't built anything yet. I'd built a strategy nobody had tested. Those are very different things, and I didn't know that yet either.

That's where the story actually starts — not with the idea, and not with the code, but with the first time I found out the difference between a strategy that looks right on a chart and a strategy that's actually right. That's the next post.

Follow bots built the way this post describes

Walk-forward tested, forward-tested on paper, then run with real risk limits. 15-day free Platinum trial, no card required.