I think you have a good plan. It would be nice if you had 6 months to 1 year of manual forward tested data before you tried to code anything. You will need concrete entry and exit parameters before you code anything. You have many headaches ahead of you but don't give up. For example, is your S&R based on singular intraday day or multi-day intraday data? If it is multi-day then you face the battle of knowing which contract to roll/switch to in your backtesting. If you are using EOD data then you can easily get continuous/nearest contract data. You face things like datatypes and floating point accuracy issues. Let's say that you are not happy with whatever platform you are using and you want to pull data from that program to another program. If you were to temporarily store data in a file as a "go between" in a floating point format then you could have issues. My tip is to save all data as a string. Let's say crude oil is trading at $53.30, that data saved as a raw floating point value could be seen as $53.29999999 You need to avoid these minor problems. You will face these same issues when exporting realtime data via DDE links in ToS. ToS sucks btw...no file i/o in ThinkScript right? You also must deal with data formatting issues. For example is Corn 404.75 or 404-6? If you see a "-" then you will need to convert to decimal.A simple conversion table can do this. I don't want to scare you but as a beginner you have many battles ahead. You plan looks good, follow it and come back here if you need help. You can't accomplish anything unless you learn to code. You could pay someone but it looks like you want to take control. NinjaTrader has a million vendors selling add-ons. Someone has to have already coded the logic for S&R. Maybe you can buy most of what you need and write code to tie it all together. Good luck.
Thanks MoneyMatthew I do have 6 months of data, but I really don't trust it because during the trade, I was moving stop back and did not have a clear entry price. In a sense, i want to start over. It's a great challenge for me and I rather do it right and learn from mistakes then continue making mistakes. I use intraday pivots, close, open, close, high, and lows for S&R. A few years ago I use to pay for service that provide volume profile and fib cluster zones, but they close now. They were good for S&R, but would never share with me the algorithm to calculates this daily. lol. And they would not help much for backtesting and programming. Just forward testing. Yes, I am using EOD data. I believe my plan is doable and yes, it seems like a huge challenge ahead of me. But if I do no try to do this the right way, I will have to live with "did i really try my best to be a profitable trader, or just half-ass it and gave up" If my discretionary trading I am doing now is not working months from now, then I have to try other ideas. Bottom line is to test ideas efficiently, I have to learn to code. ANDD learn how to manual backtest these ideas efficiently to determine if they are worthy of coding. Thank you MoneyMatthew