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fundjunkie
Registered: Aug 2005
Posts: 257 |
02-21-08 05:32 PM
Quote from Jahajee:
I agree - the whole point is to TRADE, real time.
I agree that the point is to trade but can't see why the whole point is to trade real time.
Quote from Jahajee:
Multicharts is a good product, the newest version is great improvement. I have TS and got MC recently, I may go to MC totally by next month or so. Both are real time, both use EL.
I have used Multicharts and can tell you that it is an inferior product. It majors on charting and easylanguage compatibility while ignoring scalability, robustness and flexibility as drives to it's design criteria. Yes, they've cobbled together some kind of real-time interface and it may have an auto-trading front-end by now. But I can bet these have been rushed into the product to get users biting without being properly thought through. That's what Multicharts is, a rushed commerical imperative based on Tradestation going lease-only. Try to do anything that remotely stretches it and the entire rickety edifice falls down in a heap!
Multicharts is not a product I would ever trust any of my money with. It is a toy and not worthy of mentioning in the same sentence as products like Tradersstudio or Tranding Blox. real-time interfaces and auto-trading are not the benchmark by which backtest platforms should be evaluated, IMO. Quite rightly, RT broker interfaces and auto-trading should be some of the last building blocks set in place when erecting a software pyramid of performance and flexibility.
Thx
D
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optimizer
Registered: Mar 2007
Posts: 3 |
02-21-08 07:21 PM
Fundjunkie,
We back test on 30 minute and longer bars. We intraday system trade 30 minute and longer bars. Therefore, we require a intraday data feed that can supply both historical and real time data from the same source. Trading any system that was tested using a different data source than that of your trading platform can be dangerous, especially in forex.
MultiCharts and their forex-exclusive MCFX (currently in beta) offer the intraday system trader what we require to trade our systems. TradersStudio unfortunately does not offer real time data yet (per their website), therefore they are not suitable for our type of work. I hope someday TradersStudio offers real time and historical data from the same source AND a brokerage partner who’s platform uses the same intraday data feed.
That day is not today.
-Steve
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thriftybob
Registered: Jul 2006
Posts: 1252 |
02-22-08 05:01 AM
Has anyone ever tried Fidelity's Wealthbuilder or TD Ameritrade's Strategy Desk?
They are both free, at least for active traders.
I successfully did some backtesting the other day with Wealthbuilder, but unfortunately the method described that I tested was a big loser. I guess it was better to find out that way than by losing real money on it. I found the Wealthbuilder pretty easy to work with via the "wizard" that writes the code for you.
I also tried the newest version 5, but felt it was missing a lot compared to the older version.
The biggest disadvantage of Wealthbuilder is that it requires me to keep the fidelity account to get data, and their commissions are terribly high.
Next, I'll try Strategy Desk again. I tried it once before, but it seemed not ready for prime time. sometimes it takes a bit for bugs to get ironed out, so i'll give it another go.
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Andrew Kirillov
Registered: Nov 2005
Posts: 126 |
02-22-08 09:27 AM
Quote from fundjunkie:
I have used Multicharts and can tell you that it is an inferior product.
Multicharts is not a product I would ever trust any of my money with. It is a toy and not worthy of mentioning in the same sentence as products like Tradersstudio or Tranding Blox.
D [/B]
I completely disagree with those statements. I have several facts that could make change your mind.
1. It is necessary to compare apples to apples. MultiCharts 3.0 back testing engine and capabilities are one of the best in the industry and it is confirmed by hundreds of traders and independent magazines reviews. It is a first product that has true-dynamic portfolio backtesting. It means that all symbols are backtested at the same time, not one by one and a user has ability to modify position sizing and enter/exist logic on the fly using global portfolio variables. See attached diagram. All products I tested used unrealistic simulation. They simply test all symbols independently and create list of trades. After that they remove trades using capital limitations. In reality it doesn’t work, since capital changes must dynamically be reflected and generate new trades if possible. All these complicated features work properly in MultiCharts portfolio backtester. Can you say that MC is inferior product after that?
2. We worked with you (Fundjunky) in the past and we know what tasks you tried to accomplish. You wanted to “map” very large number of files and collect real-time data for hundreds of symbols simultaneously. Yes we had the problems with such a large number of symbols. It is a feature that nobody uses except you. You are the first and last customer who tried to do it and had complains. It is very time and resource consuming to make it work properly. So it is not economically sound for us to do it for a single customer who wants to archive something that is hard to archive.
However when you say "It is a toy and not worthy of mentioning in the same sentence as products like Tradersstudio or Tranding Blox." you should be fair in your comparison and statements.
Did you try the same things in these products? I'm sure you didn't, because it is simply impossible since it is not real-time products and I never saw ASCII mapping feature somewhere else. Our ASCII mapping algorithm is one of the best. It AUTOMATICALLY recognizes hundreds of different ASCII files without user intervention. Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m ready to hear your arguments.
So why do you state that it is "it is an inferior product."?
I can easily say that Windows is bad OS, because it has weak spots, but will be this statement correct? I don't think so.
3. We remember your suggestions about MultiCharts improvements. None of them were related to backtesing or auto-trading. It was more academic discussions rather that practical things.
I'm quite sure you didn't test MultiCharts backtesting properly, because all you did is tried to manage dozens and hundreds of symbols. It looks like you prefer data mining process instead of real back-testing and trading.
I’m not saying that it is bad. I just want to say that it is not easy to archive 100% reliability and scalability in all aspects of the product. Considering this fact I don't think it is not correct to say that it is inferior product especially if you compare it with products that don't have even similar features.
4. I guess you base your conclusions on obsolete version of the product.
5. Could you tell me what things you can do in other product that can’t do in MultiCharts? I want to make feature by feature analysis to be objective. Otherwise you simply mislead your colleges.
 backtester.png
This has been downloaded 291 time(s).
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Andrew Kirillov
Registered: Nov 2005
Posts: 126 |
02-22-08 09:47 AM
Quote from fundjunkie:
It majors on charting and easylanguage compatibility while ignoring scalability, robustness and flexibility as drives to it's design criteria.
Thx
D [/B]
P.S. Regarding sclalabilty:
MultiCharts 3.0 uses all available cores for indicator calculation, backtesting and optimization. Moreover it is highly optimized and works faster(optimization mode) that TS8.3 even on a single thread.
As a result it is 8 times faster than TS8.2 on Quad-Core PC and about 25 times faster on 16 cores (we used when were passing Intel certification).
Here is an excerpt from a post on our forum:
"I was playing around with the new MC 3.0 Beta.
First of all I think it's great the optimization is 8 times faster (4 cores) under MC 3.0 than my TS 8.2 and the data loading speed has improved. "
Do you still think we ignore scalability? We don’t! We know that multi-core CPU is not our future. It is our present. Since you are an engineer you probably know that multi-threading software development is much harder and requires more professionalism, labor and testing. This is why 90% of companies don’t do it. It is simply expensive. We did our best to offer tools that will be state-of-the-art.
This is why I think your criticism is one-sided.
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