Built for traders who live in spreadsheets.
StrategyXL is an Excel add-in for testing rules-based stock strategies — no code to learn, no subscription required. It's built for retail traders, semi-pro researchers, and hobbyist quants who already do their work in Excel and don't want to learn another platform.
Hi — I'm Shawn Cherry. I spent decades in the finance and software arena during my professional career, and equity markets have always been a personal passion. When I retired, I started looking for a way to seriously backtest my own trading ideas. Everything I tried was either a closed black box, a SaaS subscription with usage caps, or a separate platform that wanted me to learn its language and leave my data behind. None of them fit how I actually work, which is in Excel — the same tool every trader, analyst, and quant I've ever met already lives in.
So I built the tool I wanted. It started as a personal project to stress-test strategies against years of historical data without subscribing to anything or moving my work into someone else's web app. 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.
Research drives results. Strategies you understand and have stress-tested across years of real market data are the strategies you'll actually trust enough to follow. Everything in StrategyXL is built around that loop — load data, define a strategy, backtest it, save the result, iterate. The goal isn't to be the most-featured backtesting tool; it's to be the most honest one.
Being clear about scope saves both of us time. StrategyXL is a research tool — it does not:
If you need any of the above, this isn't the right tool today. If you want to design, test, and refine signal-driven equity strategies in the spreadsheet you already use — that's exactly what it's built for.
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. The core platform is paid-once, not subscription, so there's no incentive to manufacture features to justify a recurring fee — I just build what gets asked for. See the roadmap for what's on deck and email ideas@strategyxl.com to add yours.
Questions, bug reports, or feedback go to support@strategyxl.com. Feature requests go to ideas@strategyxl.com. Every email gets a real reply.
