What's the cheapest backtesting software out there? The best I have found is Tradestation, since all you need to do is fund an account. I'm just thinking there might be an application I have overlooked. Thanks.
There is always Multi Charts and you don't even need a account. Take the free 30 day trial and get the BigChart.Com data package with one years worth of tick data. That should run you less then $100. I have to agree that being cheap and greedy is the key to becoming a successful trader..
for 10001 time-it's all depends on many factors. complexity,time frame,security('s) etc.. how can one suggest something if the question is that lame? hey! i want to backtest some s**t..what's the cheapest option? f** yahoo finance and excel. how about that?
Thanks, I can't seem to connect to bigchart.com but I'll try again tomorrow. Well. my time frame is intraday. Can you do that with yahoo finance? I remember there was some way of downloading data from there but I forgot. All I see there is a table of daily/weekly/etc data. But that would be too tedious to copy/paste into excel, since you'd have to keep flipping through scores of pages.
Is there a beginners guide to backtesting in Excel? I don't care if it's a book that I have to actually purchase. Thanks.
I doubt anyone is giving away tick data for free, but Yahoo does have daily data and it's very easy to download. You can try this: http://investexcel.net/importing-historical-stock-prices-from-yahoo-into-excel/ Or just Google for the Yahoo URL - the one where you insert the symbol, frequency and date range - and a csv file will be immediately downloaded. There's no copying and pasting or collecting one month or one year at a time. It all comes at once on one worksheet tab.
Good points. I can add that one should expect some trade offs. For example-it will be very time consuming, if you are going to reinvent the wheel and rewrite even basic indicators in let say excel, while they are most likely already a part of ami, mentioned above.
If MetaStock is any indication, you need to double check the formulas of every indicator used in every trading software you buy. There are some horribly inaccurate indicator formulae out there. So maybe Excel isn't such a bad trade-off if one is meticulous about the setup and formulas.