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Roger Rines
Registered: Apr 2007
Posts: 9 |
11-11-07 11:44 PM
Hello Murray,
I think this is the first time we’ve chatted. I’ve read your books and followed your writings in Futures for a while, and as you’ve confirmed, I’m one of your customers.
Let’s discuss a few items so that we can leave the record clean.
Quote from Murray Ruggiero: If you wanted printed ones all you needed to do is pay $49.00 for them they are available on the site.
Gyles was the person asking about the manual. My comments were intended to share what I knew about written manuals from TradersStudio and Trading Blox. Hopefully he’ll read past your overly long quotation to see your comments and know what is possible for manuals.
Quote from Murray Ruggiero:
I understand you like Trading Blox , but I think your opinion is looking though rose cover glasses to a point.
All of life’s opinions see through the windows of our experiences, but I’ve not noticed the rose color. However I do know what it took me to profitably trade very large size in the markets over a long period of time (>14-years) and stay successful during that time. What I’ve shared in my postings is a reflection of what I’ve needed to know and do to be a large player in the Commodity & Forex markets, and my postings were shared so that my lessons in the school of hard-knocks and a lot of kicks would trickle down to open minds and save some a few bruises.
In this specific case, Trading Blox Builder (TBB) is the first back testing platform that I’ve owned that has the capacity to get me past all the manual data work I’ve had to do in the past to just get close to achieving what I described in my earlier postings here. In my system development and system-trading world, testing a method means testing the overall trade control strategy, and that goes way beyond just testing a set of trading rules on a basket of markets. In most cases it is this second level risk control decision process that can make or break a good system, so if survival is important, then it is critical for all the trading steps be tested as extensively. Once a trader decides to employ real money without knowing how risk-control affects their performance that is the time when life will begin teaching difficult lessons.
Another reason I’m enjoying Trading Blox Builder is its ability to get me away from generating of all my secondary testing and processing steps. In order to achieve the listed goals posted earlier, I’ve had to write a number of Windows GUI applications to create a blended portfolio of TradeStation’s test results into a date aligned performance file that is then be processed by other utilities that had to be written. All that effort left too many manual steps where mistakes got made, and those mistakes made life’s stress level much higher than I needed to experience while moving new systems into the market.
Let’s step back to my motivation to purchase TradersStudio. When you said it offered portfolio testing, I made the leap based solely upon your promise that it would do just that, and now with your second-generation release (2.xx) I can say it does meet that promise and for that I’m grateful. However TradersStudio didn’t get me as far as I wanted to go, so I went looking for a more capable solution. For others who are less demanding than I am, or those new to system development, I honestly believe they can learn a lot by working with your software. I also believe that if you keep up the development progress I’ve seen, you’ll be able to expand its capabilities and be able to expand the utility your customers achieve from being your customer.
In my case I’ve moved to TBB for two reasons. My first reason was TradersStudio didn’t support multiple time frame data loading earlier this year when I made the decision to make the move. In my case I have systems that must generate their signals from a higher time frame than which it generates it performance results (Signals from weekly data, trade results from daily – both data compressions seen by the system as it moves through the testing period). My second reason was Trading Blox Builder did begin supporting multiple time frames with their version 2.2.x releases, and TBB has added capabilities that TradeStation required me to create a DLL in order to use my dual time frame trading approach.
Do I like Trading Blox Builder? Yes, and hopefully it is clear why, but in simple terms it works for me right now because it is satisfying my need for performance, reliability and testing control. It also has the ability to test the entire trading process as I need it by allowing a date based portfolio-level risk control rules to influence how each market’s signals are processed on a day-by-day basis. It is hard to express how important I believe it is to control trading from a macro account level, but let me just say it does wonders in reducing the number of times I get surprised in the heat of the battle.
Quote from Murray Ruggiero: Your point about processing the data sequentially is correct. It's the only way to apply money management. TradersStudio did that at the TradePlan level since day one. It processes 1 market at a time when you run sessions and one bar at a time when you run a Tradeplan. This gives you the best of both worlds with less overhead, so I want to make it clear, Trading Blox does not have an edge over TradersStudio there. Your analysis above is wrong on this point.
All this paragraph tells me about your view of risk control is that we are seeing the world through different prisms, or you don’t really have experience with Trading Blox Builder works, or maybe I never discovered some features in TradersStudio’s documentation. Whatever the reason, let’s just agree to disagree on this point, because it is these kind of differences that help us make different decisions in the market which is healthy for both of us.
Quote from Murray Ruggiero: Another important issue is the EasyLanguage Migration tool. This has improved greatly in each release. Customer only need to send us code which is not translating correctly and we will address their issues as quick as possible in the next release.
When I saw this utility I thought it was a brilliant strategy that all migrations have always needed, but nobody had bothered to create. My hat off to you for working hard to mitigate the transition issues from TradeStation, and if you’ve made it even better, then I’m certain those making the transition gained a lot from the experience. I didn’t fair too well with that utility early in its initial release, but then again I didn’t really need it with my experience so it wasn’t an issue.
Quote from Murray Ruggiero: I know I am bias but since you use Trading Blox and most likely have talked to them on the phone and gotten to know them so are you.
Murray, nobody understands better than I that parents don’t have ugly kids, so your bias is understandable. However your bias statement about me is a bad assumption. I never once spoke on the phone to TBB’s developer, and I didn’t come to know anything about them other than they answered my Trading Blox questions I would ask each year. When I made the purchase last spring, it was because they finally said what I had wanted to hear about Trading Blox, so I spent the money. This is just like the way I purchased TradersStudio. I sent emails asking questions about TradersStudio, and got answers that made me spend the money. I did this with Trading Recopies (now Mechanica) and PowerST, but didn’t get what I needed back then, so I didn’t buy those.
When I made my TradersStudio purchase and when I purchased Trading Blox, I wasn’t sure if the purchase was going to achieve what I wanted. In both cases it didn’t, but with Trading Blox the improvements I needed happened in a few weeks from asking by including the weekly control items I needed to be effective for multiple time frame data loading and testing. Since that moment in time all our communications for support request on their forum have taught me their development paradigm understands how to trade, they believe in the overall testing strategy that I had to learn the hard way, TBB people are friendly and good to have as support, and just as important they are not done expanding what they intend to include in the software.
During my brief TBB ownership time, I liked how responsive TBB’s development has performed and I see nothing that indicates this will change. Just as important, I’ve supported Omega Research for 20-years (System Writer in 1987, TradeStation since 1991) and like the people I know at TradeStation. In addition, I’ve written a DLL tutorial on how to get more from TradeStation that explains how TradeStation’s API works and what Easy Language needs to use third-party controls. This work was released under the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE agreement. So if liking the people I work with and having their products help me get the job done constitutes a bias, I guess I’m biased, but tell me who doesn’t like performance that generates positive results in a friendly atmosphere?
Quote from Murray Ruggiero: I think you even have to agree , based on price and features TradersStudio is a better value.
We don’t agree on this yet, but I certainly hope your efforts over time make me into a believer. I promise to be open minded to what I see and hear. Good Luck with TradersStudio, it is filling a nice piece of what is needed in system testing.
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Roger Rines
Registered: Apr 2007
Posts: 9 |
11-12-07 12:17 AM
Hello “a5519”,
Why does that sound like I'm talking to a computer? 
Quote from a5519: Roger Rines,
Its a good review. You have pointed absolutely correctly that processing sequence is the important topic to get possibility to implement realistic risk management rools on a portfolio of systems/markets.
My posted information came from a lot of beatings and successes that generated more low days than I needed. Thanks for the supportive words.
Quote from a5519: In my evaluation of TradingBlox I have understood that it doesn't have an interface to external modules, such as DLLs and COMs. This was a KO criteria in selecting TradigBlox because I know that at some time in the future I will not be able to implement something that I want using the build in features.
I had the same reservations going in, but at my time of purchase I was told about TBB’s “C++ Extension Project” that is in their development plans behind another important project being implemented.
With that said, some of the things I needed from my external TradeStation DLLs like, “LastDayOfWeek”, “OpenOfTomorrow”, “ISO_WeekNumber”, Global Variables, and Global Arrays, all of these are already implemented in Trading Blox Basic as intrinsic options except for “ISO_WeekNumber”, but I was able to create a Trading Blox for the week number process without any need to look outside of Trading Blox. Some of these are now in Easy Language, but they weren’t when I needed them.
However, I do know that I’m going to need the ability to get access to DLLs at some point and with the promise that ability is coming, I’m going on faith that it will be available not too long after I get all my systems migrated into Trading Blox Builder.
As for “COM” and “,Net”, I’m not a fan of either. When I’m faced with a need to interface to a COM-Object, I usually go around the COM-Interface and use Microsoft’s ATL-DLL to get direct function access. It is much faster than COM will ever be with its high processing overhead and lookups, and its often what Microsoft uses. As for “.Net”, I’ve been spared that experience so far.
Quote from a5519: The basic-like language of TradingBlox is also not the most modern and appealing feature.
We are different on this point. I’ve written software in a lot of different compiled languages over the years and like Power BASIC the best for speed, its ability to use inline Assembly, great user community, and sometimes better performance against C++, all of which make it a great language for building Console or Windows API based GUI applications.
I like Trading Blox Basic because it is close to Easy Language, TradersStudio Visual Basic/Microsoft Visual Basic, and Power BASIC. With all the languages being so similar the process of transition boils down to understanding the processing of the testing paradigm, its built-in functions and variable tools, and then looking up the words that are different. For me it means I can move around in my various testing platforms and compare results without having to learn too much to get the task accomplished.
If you like Trading Blox, keep an eye on it and at some point I suspect you will, like I did, get the answers to your email questions you need to make it an attractive consideration.
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kevin107
Registered: Oct 2002
Posts: 8 |
11-14-07 07:09 PM
Gyles,
Do any of the programs you have evaluated have the ability to backtest using OHLC of constant volume bars?
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Gyles
Registered: Aug 2007
Posts: 366 |
11-15-07 01:51 AM
Quote from DonKee:
do you have a review of
http://www.tradingrecipes.com/index.html ?
I had a look at the same and found it interesting.
Quote from Gyles:
I have not yet done so. However, I would like to review the software Mechanica in Elite Trader Forums.
Is it possible to get a demo? If so, please tell me the differences between the real version and the demo one, so that I can take them into consideration while doing the review.
Moreover, I sincerely wished to do the review, but was unable to do so as I do not have any response regarding the demo. I had send emails to the support and till date, no answer has come.
Thus, I feel that for price of $3000.00 upgrade and $10,000 and the product, and not getting any response to my email inquiries, makes me wonder as to how I can trust their support or support and why should I buy from them?
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Gyles
Registered: Aug 2007
Posts: 366 |
11-18-07 08:46 PM
Quote from lindq:
You should also look into Investor RT at www.linnsoft.com.
There are many IRT users here on ET.
Sincere thanks, lindq for your inputs; please post your opinions regarding the above software for the benefit of the Elite Trader Forum.
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