By TickDistill — order-flow microstructure signals. Educational content, not financial advice.
Most signal vendors ship one frozen number. TickDistill ships a signal you can tune. Each signal is, under the hood, a function of a few parameters (“knobs”) — for example, how one-sided the order flow must be, how tightly price must be contained, how much committed volume must accumulate, and over what time window. We ship sensible defaults, but you can turn the knobs to match how you trade.
All knobs are expressed in sigma units (see sigma-normalization), so their meaning stays stable as markets change: a knob set to “2σ” asks for a genuinely rare condition whether the market is calm or volatile.
Raw knobs are powerful but intimidating. So each signal comes with named presets — curated parameter sets such as Conservative, Balanced, or style-oriented ones like Scalp and Swing. A preset is just a good starting configuration; you can adopt it as-is or nudge a knob from there. Beginners get a working signal immediately; experts get a fast path to their own setup.
Turning the knobs trades frequency against conviction:
TickDistill shows you, in real time as you move a knob, how often the signal would have fired historically and how rare the current setting is. You see the tradeoff instead of guessing it.
Here is the trap. It is easy to tune knobs until a backtest looks perfect — and a configuration that fired only a handful of times in two years can look flawless purely by luck. That is curve-fitting, and it is the fastest way to fool yourself in this field.
We surface the rarity/frequency meter precisely so you don’t. If a setting only ever fired three times, the tool tells you — that is not a robust edge, it is a coincidence with good marketing. A signal that fires with reasonable, stable frequency across regimes is far more trustworthy than one hand-fit to a backtest’s high points.
This is the same principle behind everything we publish: we sell the shovels, not promises of gold. The knobs are tools for building your strategy with clear eyes — not a slot machine for mining a pretty equity curve.
TickDistill sells clean, computed order-flow inputs — not trading advice or guaranteed alpha. Tuning a signal does not make it predictive; backtests are illustrative and not a promise of future results.