Coding an Expert in TradeStation

Hi all,

I trade Forex and I currently use MetaTrader 4 for charting, and I am studying the possibility of jumping into TradeStation because I have heard that its programming language is more powerful.

I have a question though: is it possible to program experts in TradeStation is order to backtest my systems? you know, the typical expert of "buy when close price in the daily chart crosses over the 55 EMA and add a possition when it crosses over 144 EMA, then sell at the crossback etc" type of thing.

Is TradeStation easy to program such things?


Thank!

 

Piece of cake:

http://www.tradestation.com/strategy_testing/st_creation.shtm

 

Very simply it's done like this...

if close crosses over xaverage(close, 55) then buy next bar at market;
if close crosses over xaverage(close, 144) then buy next bar at market;
if close crosses below xaverage(close, 55) then sell next bar at market;
if close crosses below xaverage(close, 144) then sell next bar at market;

There are more nuances when you come to have live strategies.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. Another question: once that expert has been coded in, can you run in on, say, 5 years historical data and see the overall performance? you know, win/loss ration, total profit/loss, max drawdown, etc?

I need to have this questions answered before I signed up for TradeStation.

Thanks!

 

Assuming you can get 5 years of data from TS (you need a trading account with them for 99/month plus the initial account funds plus exchange fees or pay about 250/month if you don't), the answer is yes.

TS sometimes gives you a trial run for free, call one of their salespeople to see if they will do that for you. To me, you should try the software out before you start paying for it.

DS

 

If I could just piggy-back on this thread:

Once you have a strategy coded, how realiable is it to autotrade it at Tradestation securities with minimal (read: no) supervision?

I'm specifically refering to a daytrading strategy which trades futures of one of the major US stock indicies, e,g, ES, ER2 or NQ.

Can it start and stop trading each day automatically or is it necessary to manually start it and stop it?

Richard

 

Your question shouldn't surround Tradestation only, because
runing unattended system requires assurance about other
issues like power outage, PC crash, low PC configuration,
having backup feed, type of servers you choose to seat
your orders and stops, bad tick filtering, ......

and most important is the type of strategy you are trying to
automat (with scalping systems being the hardest to position
trading being the easiest and less risky to automate).
If you take few weeks to seat and watch with your system
before anyone can tell you what can go wrong.

The aim for having automated system is not leaving your
system unattended always, it's for emergency days that you
can stay glued to your pc, and have other non-trading
obligations to fulfill.

 

FX daily data in TS goes back to November 2000. FX intraday back to November 2002. TS have stated that they're not going to increase this. If you want to test on more data then you can import your own data files.

I've attached a sample strategy testing report. You need to unzip it and then you should be able to view it with Internet Explorer (it's quite big - 0.5Mb zipped, 1.5Mb unzipped).

Cheers

 

As Nana Trader says this isn't something you should try. If you want to have unattended strategies then you really need broker assist. There are several companies out there that will take your strategies and trade them for you (for a fee or course).

 

Here is a response from Dean at Tradestation to a similar question:

"The strategy automation execution system on the platform will attempt to recover from a disconnect and many times is successful in doing so. However, I'm going to confirm your suspicion that it is very risky if not downright foolish to leave automated execution to trade without confirmation unattended for extended periods of time. While typically your trading will run flawlessly over and over again, it can take just one failure to wipe out a lot of capital. The trader must be ready - and is responsible - to take control when something unexpected occurs."

DS

ps-remember the part that says, if it screws up and costs you a bundle, it's your fault.

I'm not knocking TS by posting this either. S... happens and if no one is around monitoring, then .....,