Lookback (N Periods Ago)
Reading any factor's value as of N seconds or bars ago — the building block of hand-rolled indicators.
What it means
Most custom logic reduces to comparing now against then: price versus a minute ago, strength versus its value before the spike, this minute's open versus the last. A lookback operator gives every factor a time machine.
In TraderWe, appending N to a factor name turns it into a lookback function: PriceN(60) is the price 60 seconds ago, CandleOpenN(1) is the previous minute's open. This composes into rate-of-change, breakout and divergence logic without any special indicator library.
Why traders care
- Build exactly the comparison you mean instead of approximating with a canned indicator.
- Works uniformly across factors — price, volume, book, strength.
In a TraderWe strategy
if Price > PriceN(300) and Strength > StrengthN(300):
Buy()Both price and buyer control higher than five minutes ago.
Educational content, not investment advice. Engine details describe how TraderWe computes this value; other platforms may define it differently.