Built for traders who live in spreadsheets.
StrategyXL is an Excel add-in for evidence-based investing. Nightly research surfaces ideas and seasonal patterns across roughly 600 instruments. A backtest engine pressure-tests them against decades of daily history — and keeps every run you've ever made, so today's idea can be compared against the last forty. Connect your own Charles Schwab account — read-only, so it can never place an order — and the options tools price covered calls, cash-secured puts, credit spreads, and buy-writes off your live chain, with the roll and assignment math already done; that same connection streams live quotes into your sheets. And a charting window puts price, total return, and your trade markers on one screen.
All of it lands in Excel, where you can do whatever you want with the numbers afterward. It's built for self-directed investors who already live in spreadsheets and want the analysis done properly — without learning another platform or moving their work into someone else's web app.
Hi — I'm Shawn Cherry. I'm a CPA who spent his career in finance and software: a few years in corporate accounting, then my first developer role, then on to ERP implementations, which led to my first CIO seat — and finally CFO, with technology still mine to run. I've traded equities since the early days of online brokerages, and for the last decade options have been the center of it. Today I trade my own account for income — covered calls and buy-writes around a core of growth holdings — so I'm not building this for a market I read about. I use it every day, with my own money, and I feel every rough edge.
Here's what actually pushed me to build it. Like most people doing this seriously, I had a spreadsheet for everything: a trade log, a covered-call analyzer, a roll worksheet, a spread calculator. Each one worked. Together they were a mess — the same ticker retyped in four places, no shared history, and nothing that could tell me how a strategy had actually done over time. Meanwhile the market-data add-in I paid for was fundamentally a data tool: it streamed numbers into my spreadsheet and left all the analysis to me, on a subscription that kept climbing until I couldn't justify it. Everything else I tried was a closed black box, or a separate platform that wanted me to learn its language and leave my data behind.
So I built the thing I actually wanted: one place instead of twelve, with a real database underneath it, in Excel — the tool every trader, analyst, and quant I've ever met already lives in. After a couple of months of using it, polishing it, and quietly accumulating features that solved real problems I kept hitting, it became obvious it'd be useful to other people in the same position. That's StrategyXL.
It's a commercial product but it's still just me. Every line of code, every email reply, every feature decision — that's me. No team page with stock photos, no investor deck, no growth-team agenda. The upside of that is the product can stay focused on what its users actually need; the downside is that I won't ship features I can't personally maintain. I think that's a fair trade.
One place, not twelve. The point isn't any single calculation; it's that your positions, your analysis, and your history finally sit in one system with a real database under them — instead of scattered across a dozen files that don't know about each other.
Evidence over instinct. Strategies you understand and have stress-tested across years of real market data are the ones you'll actually trust enough to follow — and the ones you'll stick with when a month goes against you.
Honest before featured. The goal isn't to be the most-featured tool; it's to be the most honest one. Where a number could be computed a flattering way or a correct way, it gets computed the correct way — and the method is written down.
Not your whole stack. I still use other tools myself — Seeking Alpha is one of my favorites for deep analysis. StrategyXL isn't trying to replace them; it's where everything comes together — my positions, my analysis, and my history in one place. Any product claiming to be all things is lying to you about at least one of them.
Being clear about scope saves both of us time. StrategyXL is built to be one place for the whole loop — research, backtesting, options analysis, and, as the trade log lands, your positions and history alongside them. What it isn't is a broker. It does not:
None of that is an apology — it's the shape of the tool, and it's why I still use other things alongside it. Your broker executes. Your alerts come from wherever you already watch the market. A lot of the reading happens on the web. StrategyXL is where the analysis and the history live — your research, your backtests, your options analysis, and your trade history, in the spreadsheet you already use.
Market data is provided by Tiingo via their developer program. StrategyXL never sees your data fees — you sign up for your own free Tiingo account, paste your API token into the add-in once, and the data flows directly from Tiingo to your spreadsheet. Tiingo does not endorse StrategyXL.
StrategyXL's roadmap is public. Features come from what users actually request, not from a private wishlist or VC pressure to ship velocity for its own sake. You own the core outright — no subscription just to keep it running — so I'm not manufacturing features to justify a monthly bill. I just build what gets asked for. See the roadmap for what's on deck, or to add it.
Questions, bug reports, or feature requests? — every note gets a real reply.
