Further reduced a rare Excel crash on close. When Live Data was streaming, quitting Excel could still occasionally make it briefly vanish and reopen — Excel crashing during shutdown and Office restarting it, not a genuine reopen. This release cuts that down substantially; the rare remaining case traces to a bug inside Excel's own shutdown (which we've reported), only ever affects a live-streaming session, and never touches your data.
Honest Live Data connection status. The Schwab Connection window used to show "Connected" whenever your credentials were saved — even if the live connection had actually been dropped. It now checks the real connection and tells you plainly whether you're connected, need to reconnect, or are simply offline.
Connecting on a second PC now reads correctly. Schwab allows one live stream per account, so connecting the same Schwab app on another PC signs the first one out. The first PC now says so clearly and offers a one-click reconnect, instead of continuing to look connected. Your StrategyXL license still covers both of your PCs exactly as before — only the live Schwab connection moves.
Your Schwab App Key and Secret now display masked (dots plus the last four characters), so they stay off-screen during a screen-share or screenshot. They're still saved — click a field to enter a new value, or leave it blank to keep the existing one.
Enhancements
New Error Log under the ribbon's Help menu — a plain-text log of any genuine errors StrategyXL has run into (data fetches, licensing, Live Data, backtests), gathered in one place so you can send it to support if you ever need to. If nothing has gone wrong, there's nothing to send. It's capped in size, stays on your own PC, and never contains your keys or account details.
v1.1.0July 19, 2026· 2 fixes · 9 new
The biggest StrategyXL release yet.Live Data brings options and stock data from your own Charles Schwab account straight into Excel — options chains, income setups, a live Setups Monitor, and Roll Analysis — while Advanced Charting opens any Price History in a full-screen, TradingView-style interactive chart with a fund-style returns table.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an Excel crash on close. With StrategyXL loaded, quitting Excel could make it briefly vanish and reopen — that was Excel crashing during add-in shutdown and Office automatically restarting it, not a genuine reopen. Shutdown is now clean, including when Advanced Charting windows or a Live Data connection are open.
Price History now shows a clear "ticker not found" message when a symbol isn't recognized (matching the Options Chain), instead of a confusing "data format may have changed" error.
Enhancements
New Live Data ribbon group — options and stock data brought straight into Excel from Charles Schwab's cloud API, with no ThinkOrSwim or other desktop app running. You connect your own Schwab account through a free Schwab developer app (bring-your-own credentials, the same idea as your Tiingo key), and StrategyXL is strictly read-only: it can only read market data — never place an order or move money — and your credentials stay encrypted on your own PC. Live Data is entirely optional (everything else in StrategyXL works without it), and the in-app Live Data guide walks you through the one-time setup.
Which Schwab APIs you subscribe your app to makes a real difference in what Live Data can do, so it's worth knowing up front. The Market Data API on its own gives you snapshots — the Options Chain and the =sXL_* formulas — but nothing updates on its own. Adding the Accounts & Trading API unlocks Schwab's real-time stream, which is what powers the live Setups Monitor, the =sXL_Live_* streaming formulas, and a Watchlist that updates on every quote. StrategyXL never trades either way — that second API is used only to open the market-data stream — so to get the full Live Data experience you'll want both enabled.
Live Data › Options Chain — pull a full options chain for any underlying and read it as insight rather than a data dump. The panel surfaces covered-call and cash-secured-put income setups (premium, yield, annualized, distance to strike), Buy-Write / called-away math, a price-range panel, and a next / last earnings overlay with the most recent beat or miss. (Available with just the Market Data API.)
Live Data › Setups Monitor — take the setups you find on the chain and watch them update in real time. Drill straight from an Options Chain setup, or from a Research idea's new Options Setup column, into a monitor that keeps ticking — snapshot to find, stream to watch. (Uses the live stream, so it needs the Accounts & Trading API.)
Live Data › Roll Analysis — a decision board for an open options position that lines up every roll, adjustment, assignment, or close side by side against the honest baseline of closing it right now. It handles single legs and spreads (including unbalanced and ratio), frames each choice across the whole position's prior credits, break-even, and cushion, and lets you save positions to revisit later.
Live Data formulas — =sXL_Live_* streams equity and option data (including greeks) into any cell in real time (real-time streaming, so it needs the Accounts & Trading API), while =sXL_* pulls point-in-time snapshots such as quotes and fundamentals from the Market Data API. Your Research Watchlist automatically goes live when streaming is available: the last price and every change column update on each tick.
New Advanced Charting button above the Price History chart — opens a full-screen, TradingView-style interactive chart of that sheet's data. Choose Line, Candlestick, OHLC bars, or Heikin-Ashi; switch between a dollar-price view (with your moving-average and Bollinger overlays, dividend markers, and Total Return) and a total-return-percent view (rebased to the visible window, with benchmark compare); and navigate with calendar-span presets (30 days through 10 years, and All), mouse-wheel zoom, a dashed baseline / 0% line, and per-series last-value labels.
Advanced Charting also shows a fund-fact-sheet returns table beneath the chart — each instrument's annual total return by year, plus its CAGR and the growth of $10,000 since inception, shaded with the familiar green / red heatmap for quick reading.
Price History charts are dramatically faster — even a heavy symbol now fetches and charts in about a second and a half, and a new status-bar readout reports the elapsed time and bar count after each fetch. (The in-sheet timeframe selector now tops out at 3 Years; Advanced Charting still renders the full history instantly.)
v1.0.7July 6, 2026· 7 fixes · 5 new
Bug Fixes
Re-opening (or re-pulling) a saved run now rebuilds every parameter exactly — including the new Pullback fields — and restores the run's Batch Name, so a Copy Template of a re-opened run no longer diverges from the original. (A backtest saved before v1.0.6 re-runs slightly higher the first time you re-open it, because the newer engine credits the dividends paid while each position was held; the trades and dates are identical, and it reproduces exactly after that first re-run.)
Copy Template now preserves deliberately-cleared fields — a blanked-out setting no longer silently reverts to its default.
The Trade Log now labels Pullback exits clearly — "MA reclaim" (the mean-reversion target) versus "Time Exit."
Short-position backtests now mark equity and report returns correctly. A mark-to-market error could previously produce inflated equity spikes and an overstated maximum drawdown on trades held short; both are fixed.
Price History indicator charts no longer collide when two charts of the same type are open on different sheets — each renders its own data.
Research and Index Holdings data no longer needlessly re-downloads (or briefly shows stale figures) around market holidays.
More robust licensing — a transient network error during a license check now falls back to the offline grace period instead of reading as an invalid license.
Enhancements
New Pullback / Dip Entry signal, in a new Mean Reversion ribbon group — an eighth signal type that enters on the magnitude of a decline rather than a recovery. Buy when price drops at least your chosen percentage either over N trading days (a short, sharp dip) or below its highest close of the last N bars (set N = 252 for the classic "X% off the 52-week high"). It ships tuned Connors-style — exit when price reclaims its 5-day average (taking profit at the mean), with a 30-bar time-exit backstop and Exit on Signal Reversal off — and it gives the Research dip Ideas a one-click backtest that reproduces the published figure.
New Watchlist in the Research group — your own curated list of stocks and ETFs, saved on your PC and remembered across workbooks (unlike the nightly Ideas / Seasonal / Explore feeds the engine builds for you). Two switchable views: Performance shows last close, the day's change, and 1-week through 1-year plus YTD returns; Levels & signals shows the 52-week high/low with the % move to reach each, price vs. its 200-day average, RSI(14), dividend yield, the date you added it, and your own editable Notes. Every row carries a live count of Ideas firing for that name (click through to Ideas), and its ticker opens a price chart. Multi-period returns are dividend-included total return; the quote and 52-week range are split-adjusted price.
New Tag Run button on a finished single-ticker Stock Backtest sheet (next to Copy Template) — set or replace the run's Batch Name after it runs, so you can promote a Research drill-down to "Favorites," group one-off runs under a shared label, and filter on it in Results History.
Every Research row — Ideas, Seasonal, and Explore — now shows the instrument's real company name instead of repeating the ticker.
The backtest signals are regrouped for clarity: MACD Signal Crossover now sits under Momentum, the breakout signals under Breakout / Volatility, and the new Mean Reversion group holds Pullback / Dip Entry.
v1.0.6July 2, 2026· 3 fixes · 9 new
Bug Fixes
Install order no longer matters next to other Excel add-ins. Installing, upgrading, or uninstalling StrategyXL previously could overwrite or remove another add-in's auto-load registration, leaving its functions broken until that add-in was reinstalled. The installer now registers StrategyXL in the first free slot, never touches other add-ins' entries, and closes the gap it leaves on uninstall — in any install order.
The MACD chart's histogram could render as flat lines instead of green/red columns, on both the Price History MACD chart and the Stock Backtest signal chart. Both now draw correctly.
Re-opening a saved run from Results History now fills the template with that run's ticker — it could previously show your saved default ticker instead, making it look like the wrong run had opened.
Enhancements
New Research ribbon group — a nightly study over the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and major ETFs that measures how well-known technical events (golden cross, 200-day reclaim, RSI recovery, breakouts, big drawdowns, and more) have historically played out in each instrument, surfaced three ways. Everything is raw material for your own testing — not advice.
Research › Ideas — the vetted shortlist: instruments where an event recently fired and that event has historically shown a forward edge in that instrument strong enough to clear an evidence bar. Filter by recency and strength score.
Research › Seasonal — calendar-month tendencies: for any month, each instrument's up-year frequency, average and median return, and its current streak of consecutive up (or down) years. The chart link opens Price History anchored to the start of the streak so you can see the whole run.
Research › Explore — the full instrument × event landscape with the vetted rows flagged, for open-ended digging. Filter by ticker, signal, strength, or vetted-only.
Every Research row drills down in one click: Backtest links (5-year and full-history) that run immediately with the study's exact assumptions and land on the results sheet, and a Price History link with the triggering bars shaded on the chart. Drill-down runs are logged under the batch name "Research" so they're easy to filter in Results History, and each Research tab remembers your filter choices via Save Defaults.
Exit on Signal Reversal is now a real switch (previously always on). Turn it off to hold positions until a stop, target, or time exit fires — the classic asymmetric playbook, e.g. enter when RSI recovers through 30 and take profit at 70 without the re-cross below 30 closing the trade early. Signals with a built-in exit level keep it either way, and StrategyXL warns you if a run is left with no exit at all.
Backtests now earn dividends. When a stock goes ex-dividend while a position is held, the dividend is credited to the account as cash (shorts pay it), shown in a new Dividends$ trade-log column and included in every P&L figure. This makes the strategy-vs-Buy-&-Hold comparison fair — the benchmark always earned dividends; now your strategy does too. New runs on dividend payers will score modestly better than the same run in earlier versions; saved runs still re-open exactly as recorded.
Returns now consistently include dividends across the product. Price History's % change, CAGR, period returns, monthly heatmap, and seasonality are computed on dividend-included total return (charts, indicators, and signals stay split-adjusted, matching popular online charting tools), CAGR uses one calendar-day formula everywhere, and seasonality averages compound the way real money does. These figures will shift slightly versus earlier versions — they're now the more accurate "what you actually earned" numbers.
Default slippage lowered from 0.10% to 0.05% per side on new templates — more realistic for liquid large-caps filling at the next open. Your saved defaults are untouched.
v1.0.5June 19, 2026· 1 fix · 0 new
Bug Fixes
Compatibility with other Excel add-ins — in some setups, installing StrategyXL could cause another installed add-in's custom functions to stop working (showing #NAME?), because the two add-ins shared a common software component at different versions. StrategyXL now matches the widely-used version of that component, so it loads cleanly alongside other installed add-ins. None of StrategyXL's features changed, and your saved backtests, settings, and templates are untouched.
v1.0.4June 10, 2026· 2 fixes · 6 new
Bug Fixes
Excel could take 10+ seconds to start when the local price cache had grown large — add-in housekeeping ran during Excel startup. All housekeeping now waits for your first StrategyXL click, so the add-in adds nothing to Excel's start time. If the cache ever genuinely needs compacting, you're asked first, with a time estimate.
Compare to Run # silently did nothing when the chosen baseline run came from a batch backtest. Batch runs are now valid baselines, and if a run number can't be used you get a clear message instead of silence.
Enhancements
RSI Cross — new Exit Threshold setting (default 70). The strategy now follows the classic asymmetric playbook: enter when RSI recovers up through 30, take profit when it reaches 70, with the re-cross below 30 as the failure stop. Set it to 0 for the previous symmetric behavior.
Bollinger Breakout — new Exit Band setting (default Middle). Breakout trades now exit when price crosses back through the middle band, the most-used Bollinger exit, instead of riding all the way to the opposite band. Opposite remains available.
Channel Breakout — new Exit Channel Period setting (default 10). The classic Turtle asymmetry: enter on the 20-period breakout, exit on the 10-period reverse break. Set it to 0 for the previous same-period exit.
Stochastic — new Entry Zone setting (default 20). Entries now require the %K/%D cross to start in oversold (or overbought for shorts), the classic qualification that filters out mid-range whipsaw crosses. Set it to 0 to take every cross.
Signal charts draw the new exit and zone guidelines (RSI exit level, Bollinger middle band, Channel exit band, Stochastic zone), color-matched to the exit markers.
Saved runs from earlier versions re-run exactly as recorded — the new settings only apply where you set them, so Results History reproduces historical results faithfully.
v1.0.3June 5, 2026· 1 fix · 6 new
Bug Fixes
Charting a stock with limited price history (recent IPOs or newer tickers) could throw a type-mismatch error, and switching the timeframe selector sometimes collapsed the visible range. Price History overlays and the timeframe scrollbar are now robust for any length of history.
Enhancements
New Results Dashboard button — turns your backtest history into a one-page visual summary: stat cards, a return-vs-risk scatter with an efficient-frontier line (click any point to open that run), an aggregate metrics table, and best-run-per-signal leaderboards. Reads the same filters as Results History.
New Compare Runs button — put up to six saved runs side by side: a winner strip naming the best run for each headline metric, a KPI matrix, overlaid growth-of-$10,000 equity curves, and a parameter diff that highlights exactly what changed between them. Launch it from the ribbon, by selecting rows in Results History, or from the Dashboard.
Results History — signal filtering is now a multi-select: include or exclude each of the seven signal types independently, plus new upper-and-lower bounds on every performance metric to surface winners or prune under-performers.
Results History — saved filter presets: save a filter set you reuse often and re-apply it (and re-fetch) in one click.
Results History — delete runs: remove specific runs or everything matching your filters as a recoverable soft-delete, with a permanent Purge when you're sure.
Results History — KPI heatmap: each metric column shades its top quartile green and bottom quartile red, so the best and worst runs jump out of the table at a glance.
v1.0.2May 26, 2026· 2 fixes · 6 new
Bug Fixes
The Copy Template button was sometimes invisible on Stock Backtest and Price History output sheets after re-rendering. Fixed.
Annual seasonality returns now compound correctly across the entire monthly heatmap — Annual column, monthly-average row, and overall-average cell all reconcile to Total Return %.
Enhancements
New Drawdown & Profit Cushion chart in Stock Backtest. Pairs your strategy's cumulative return from start (above zero) with drawdown from peak (below zero) on dual axes, so a steep-looking drawdown is read in context of how much profit cushion you'd built up.
Newest First sort toggle in Price History — optionally sort the OHLCV table by newest dates at the top.
Moving-average, Price/MA, and Bollinger Band overlays on the Price History OHLC chart. Toggle them on/off via new template checkboxes.
Seasonality bar chart added below the monthly heatmap for at-a-glance month-by-month performance.
Index Holdings — added Above-SMA columns for 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100-day windows (alongside the existing 200-day) and a six-donut sector breakdown grid.
Chart axis titles added across Stock Backtest charts (Equity Curve, Drawdown, Trade P&L), with clarifying subtitles on the Signal Chart and Drawdown chart.
v1.0.1May 16, 2026· 3 fixes · 2 new
Bug Fixes
Annual seasonality now compounds correctly and reconciles to Total Return %.
Bollinger Bands signal now respects a Direction setting (Above or Below) for momentum vs. mean-reversion strategies.
Signal Chart no longer shows identical entry/exit markers across multiple runs on the same ticker.
Enhancements
In-product update check — when a new version ships, every install detects it on the next ribbon click and prompts to download.
New About dialog showing full version info, license status, and a one-click "Check for updates" button.
Bugs or feature requests?
— every message gets read.
