Hii I am trying to develop a discretionary/automated trading system which trades infrequently ~ 4 times a month. My main goal is to catch the big moves in stocks while trying to loose as little as possible. So I am trying to understand what factors are a good indicator of large future growth in stock price. I am looking for a backtesting software which will give me access to historical fundamental and technical data and then allow me to run tests on them. I have read a lot of reviews of backtesting software of the following multicharts Amibroker (cheap, fast, good programmability) Tradestation(good community, easy programming language, relatively slow, crash prone) Neoticker (very slow, has very complex capability) Ninjatrader R Portfolio123(fundamenta probably data available) Compustat(fundamenta probably data available) Quotecenter (fundamenta probably data available) Rightedge Quantdeveloper Matlab Currently I am evaluating Canslim and want to backtest this strategy, atleast to the extant possible. Everything in canslim is not quantifiable, so not easy to completely backtest, but I want to know whether it is a good enough strategy to build upon. However most of the above software is built based on analyzing price, volume data that is for technical analysis. Has anybody used any of the above software and can confirm that backtesting using fundamental data is available? If none of these are good enough, could somebody give me an idea from where I can get historical fundamental data for long periods of time and how much it would cost? I am relatively good at programming, so I could use something like R and c# to analyze the data. Of course free data is always appreciated Any advice would be welcome thanks
hey dude, i've done some research on data available for backtesting a few months ago, and i never camea cross fundamental data for backtesting. is there any where that you can get old fundamental data for free? maybe google? i know google has a lot of different apis available, maybe you can find one of theirs that lets you pull data easily from them in a format you can drop right into your backtesting program? i was looking, and it doesnt seem like yahoo finance has an api
Not sure if this is the sort of thing you're looking for, but ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22DygnRT-i4 BestNewsTrader was a NinjaTrader partner; but as far as I can see they are no longer in business. But perhaps you can track down some of the folks involved?
Zacks has [had?] a huge database of fundamental stuff and a backtesting engine. It used to be very expensive but I think the price came way down in the last decade...
well you can get free fundamental data, from google finance. You just have to write a web scrapper to grab that data and store it on your disk. I also have access to morningstar, from my public library. For this too, a web scrapper could potentially give you free fundamental data for 10 years. I checked out wealth lab, it seems you have to have $20000 in cash in Fidelity, or have ~100 round trades per quarter. This is probably not something I want. since I want to trade so infrequently, I will need a much longer span of data to have any statistical reliability. I will probably start by building a webscrapper for google finance or morningstar. Google is easier since they have an API.
Suit yourself, but I'd suggest you instead get your foot in the door (maybe as an unpaid intern) at a quant shop that has the usual tools - ClariFI, Compustat, FactSet, MQA - and focus your time on strategy dev rather than hackery. The long/short space is very, very crowded and competitive and you'll want access to the same resources as everyone else.