 "Excellent platform for backtesting" - sf631 | November 08, 2011 8:58 PM |
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It seems that no one has reviewed in the past couple of years. This review refers to the WealthLab Pro version (currently 6.2) which is available to US-based Fidelity account holders (available for free if you drive 120+ trades a year thru Fid) but I believe it's the same as the WLD version titled (available only to non-US users w/o fidelity accounts), hefty fee.
I was a total novice to backtesting and .NET programming when I started with WLP a few years ago. Now I'm only a partial novice... Compared to the other .NET platforms out there (NT, OQ, RightEdge, TradeLink, others...) that I've tried, WLP is comparatively less intimidating, partly because there is a really useful way to drag and drop your way into a strategy and then see the C# code that results - a great way to get comfortable with the language. Of course, it's probably much more complex than EasyLanguage or some of the other scripted programs (I haven't compared) but I do think C# development is the way to go for many reasons, portability being chief among them.
Other than ease of use/programming, I think WLP is the best option for several situations: * fundamentals-based backtesting: fidelity provides an impressive selection of historical fundamental data that's really hard to find and/or expensive to buy, such as historical P/E ratios, historical analyst estimates/ratings, historical GDP and consumer confidence metrics (lots more) that I've never found in any other platform. * portfolio level backtesting: WLP is really quite good at allowing simulation across portfolios rather than just a hundred instances of the same strategy across different symbols. * optimization and result analyses - very good visualizers and a very active developer group that's always coming up with new items * speaking of which, very active development roadmap - the software has improved by leaps and bounds in the past 2 years, and this is without any obvious revenues generated (hats off to Fidelity and MS123 for pushing the platform forward rather than letting it atrophy) * also speaking of which, very good support (Eugene and Cone must never sleep). I like that they will provide code suggestions, and will quickly respond to questions (even if sometimes they sound annoyed at the ignorance of questions). I've seen Ninja have very good support too but WLP is very good.
The only major weaknesses of WLP are (1) inability to connect to brokers other than Fidelity and (2) a bars and loop-based rather than tick and event based architecture. This makes it less suited for live trading (in my opinion) even putting aside the Fidelity only brokerage limitations |
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| "There is no better backtesting software, PERIOD!" - bwolinsky | October 18, 2008 11:07 PM |
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If you don't use this software for portfolio simulation, then you are not serious about strategy development. This is the best software ever designed for building viable, backtests on portfolios. There is no other platform that will allow to test several different time periods. If you didn't develope your system on Wealth Lab, I don't think you know what you're doing. Although it's useless in real time, this is where you go first to test your strategy. Sorry to anybody who is not with fidelity and lives in the U.S., because you're really missing out. |
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 "Not for the average user, ideal for programmers" - ellokn | August 15, 2005 9:53 AM |
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If you are comfortable with IT and the world of programming logic and limit yourself to stocks, you'll like it.
If you are not a geek and you do not want to spend your time making this work; and if you trade and test a broad range of markets, look elsewhere. |
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| "Excellent for beginners" - Vince1 | April 12, 2005 12:50 PM |
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Having little programming experience, I found the code easy enough to backtest various strategies, often involving multiple time frames. A huge knowledge base is available at their web site. The Datasource manager is OK, with multiple default providers. Overall, I had a great time with it... for a first backtesting experience. |
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| "Copycat software" - saxon | April 10, 2005 8:43 AM |
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Wealth-Lab is a pale imitation of TradeStation. |
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