I was wondering if anyone had any good recommendations on a reference to build systems. I currently have intermediate excel skills and was looking for either a book or a program which would walk me through some of the basic concepts. Thanks
Best place to start could be right here: http://www.wealth-lab.com/cgi-bin/WealthLab.DLL/home You can make systems and test here. You can try hundreds of posted systems. You can download and try for thirty days an extremely powerful system development program. All for FREE! Can't beat it and plenty worth the effort. And I have the dollars in my IB account to prove it Good luck.
Does it really requires advanced Pascal programming skills? I have heard tones of great stuff about WL, but never actually took the time to look thru it. All the coding looks kind of intimidating.
I wouldn't say that you need advanced Pascal skills, even though the scripting language is based on Dephi pascal. It would certainly help to have some kind of programing experience. But with all of the example systems that people have posted, you can pretty much see what is happening by example and trial and error.
It is definitely worth your time to try the Demo. It is actually a full-up program, it just doesn't allow script saving. Still, you have the resource of hundreds of example scripts. Some are quite complex, but some are very simple. And a lot of those simple ones test out quite well. And don't hesitate to post absolutely any question about using WL at their site. You will get quick answers from the developers themselves. I wouldn't recommend anyone trading a script that they didn't completely understand, and spend much time testing and modifying. This act of "making the system your own" is very important IMO. Another important tool for me is an Interactive Brokerage account. You just can't beat IB for low-risk testing. You can actually make a profit using very small trades. That $2 round trip commission allows good testing results for very small risk.
Wealth Lab is great for actually testing out your ideas, but it won't tell you what you should build into your system. Perry Kaufman has written two very good books on the subject, "Smarter Trading", and "Trading Systems and Development". I'd recommend reading those.
I went to the site (www.wealth-lab.com) you recommend and it seems I have ot register to do the systems testing. Is it for free? It says I can test many markets, is that for free also? Sorry for asking but I got lost on the site.
Yes, you have to register to do systems testing on the site with your own systems (scripts) and to download the demo program. But you can just find a system you are interested in, click on the name, and type in the stock or ETF to test without registering here: http://www.wealth-lab.com/cgi-bin/WealthLab.DLL/browsechartscripts I don't think you can test futures on the site. You can download the free 30-day demo and use it on futures as far as I know. But you need to have the data files. You can get all the stock files for free from Yahoo and test with those.
Once of the best starting points is right here on ET. Charlie Wright's Trading is a business section is a great starting point for strategy development http://www.elitetrader.com/tr/ Runningbear