Trying to search for a black box type trading system, or website, or plugin, I might be using the wrong term. Is "black box" what I'm looking for? Basically I'm wondering if there is something that's more than stock screening, and less than MatLab/R/etc. More advanced than "backtest moving average crossover trades for the S&P 500" but less advanced than "choose between 50 different libraries and first clean/normalize the data". I'm currently learning R and would like something that automatically (automagically) chooses the "best" inputs/criteria/factors and method/model/algorithm, or at least narrows down the list. In searching for this, what would such a platform commonly be called? Black box? Artificial intelligence? Statistical trading? Probability analysis? Likelihood modeling? Fuzzy investing? Going for seamless, automatic, friendly, easy to use. Something like Excel rather than a trading platform that uses a programming language. Thanks for any suggestions!
You want a white box I assume. This is an older post http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2968698#post2968698 Watch out for survival bias. Usually platforms that try to select systems that use a wide variaety of methods fall victims of selection and survival bias. Data mining bias can be dealt in some way with out_of_sample testing.
Matlab and R are not trading strategy development platforms per se. Although with some skill you can backstest a certain subset of trading strategies with huge efficiency, these require concious effort to avoid forward-looking bias. Have you looked at TradeStation, AmiBroker, NeoTicker, NinjaTrader, MultiCharts... that kind of tool? These let you create a comple trading strategy out of a few lines of code complet with targets, trailing stops and the like. I have never understood how having 50 libraries is worse than having 5? If you know what you want to do then 2-3 of these libraries will meet your requirements and it's easy to choose. Or maybe none and you will have to search the Web for one or write it yourself. It looks to me like you are uncertain regarding what needs to be done and at the same time feel that doing anything meaningful is too much work. So, instead of asking for a few good books on the subject, you ask for a platform where someone already pre-selected only things "that work". Intradaybill is the local expert on tools that automatically generate trading strategies based on market data.
These are all good choices. TS is good but you have to open an account. As a beginner I would go for Ami. Excellent tool, good graphics, portfolio backtesting, really inexpensive for what it does, tons of strategies in their online library and much more. There is also TradersStudio and our local expert @Murray Ruggiero, for more advanced users.
Awesome, thanks! http://www.tradingsystemlab.com/default.aspx description: Trading System Lab will auto-design and create Trading Systems automatically in as little as a few minutes using a new, high speed evolutionary algorithm. Trading System Lab will create daytrading systems, wealth lab trading systems, stock trading systems, forex trading systems, commodity trading systems and options trading systems without having to learn a programming language. keywords: trading system, daytrading stock trading systems, forex wealth lab trading systems, commodity options trading systems, easy language, genetic programming, automatic trading system generation, rmesa http://www.priceactionlab.com/ description: Price Action Lab analyzes market price action based on user-defined performance statistics and risk/reward parameters and achieves this by searching historical daily or intraday data in a fully automated way. keywords: price action, trading systems, trading software, automated trading, trader software, profitable trading, chart patterns, price patterns, Tradestation, Easylanguage, Metastock, Ninjatrader, Metatrader, TeleChart, Wealth-Lab, Amibroker, short term trading, stock trading, technical analysis, investment models, trading program, S&P 500,NASDAQ, daytrading, futures trading, forex trading, forex trading systems, equity trading, mechanical trading systems, stock charts, Hedge Fund, trading indicators, p-Indicator,Michael Harris, APS Automatic Pattern Search
Black box systems are those which are not disclosed in terms of logic while White box systems have parts of the logic exposed, but not fully disclosed. I would not trade systems which are black boxes. The reason being, "You just can not trade a system whose logic you do not understand as you will not be able to believe in it during a drawdown".
The system you get from Price Action Lab, for example, are fully disclosed but the search algorithm is not, although I don't care about that as long as I have specific code I can test and confirm the resuls.