Just wanting to forwardtest my own system. It needs tick or bar data for 50 underlyings at the same time, and their ATM strike options, as this is an options system. Can this be tested there?
Forward testing? How does it work? You get from them future prices? That would be every trader's dream ;-)
You mean testing it on live data. I'm sure many do it but since your orders won't affect the market, you will get unrealistic fills.
botpro, collective2 is more like a audited track record for your trading system. it reads info from your brokerage account and posts the track record which will allow others to see. if they like what they see, they can lease your strategy. you probably need to open up an interactive brokers paper account. they have good api's that will let you connect to the market to forward test your strategy with real data. you can post those results on collective2. even if the data is delayed, forward testing with it will add a lot of credibility to your system. real fills will be an issue since your holding periods tend to be short, but that's probably step 2 in a live forward test.
You only get 5 free trades if you are a system developer. After that it is approx 120$/6 months if you want to post your system for sale. You can't do any complex option orders, you have to leg into trades. You can do conditional orders though They have a method where it copies your trades from a live brokerage account. Never tried it though a bit hesitant to provide my brokerage login to a third party, but I assume it would work with a paper trading account. It says the feature is in public beta
Sure, just try the free 5 trades and you will see. Of course all the problems of sim trading apply, but if you are using a liquid option, you could expect fairly realistic fills... Investopedia also have option trading although it is limited to buy and sell and using delayed data, but that's what you get for free... A better option would be to sign up for a free Ameritrade account and use TOS's option trader Papermoney program. It is a bit complicated and also uses delayed data, but probably more realistic than Investopedia's.... https://www.thinkorswim.com/t/pm-registration.html
Thanks everybody for the info and suggestions on how to test this with real data. I'm in contact with a company who will provide the infrastructure (data, API), and IB paper trading with API seems to be the next best I can do, though with delayed data. Haven't checked TD/TOS API yet, but will research it soon as well.