Excel vs TradeStation

The TradeStation was designed from the ground up not to work with time series alone - it was designed to be one of the best strategy creation and automation packages in the world....I am saying that, in terms of ease and breadth of strategy creation capabilities, EXCEL is far superior to TradeStation...which was a very pleasant discovery for me....pleasant because the ratio of books and freely available information on excel programming is 1 to 1000 as compared to the information about TS programming.,,,even if I have access to TradeStation forum,,,

 

I am not talking about simple indicator crossover/combination strategies here...but more complex adaptive ones

 

I am just coming to the conclusion that the obstacles to programming for the usual TS user can be inhibiting the development of the trading system itself - whose logic is far more important than you ability to to manipulate dynamic multi-arrays within tradestation environment....

 

Again, sorry to disagree. Yes, Tradestation has it's weaknesses...and the debugger or lack thereof is one of them. Also, the lack of Case logic statements.....which was lacking in TS2000i...forcing a ton of nested if-then-else statements....ugh ! However, they've added Case in TS8 from what I understand.
Once more, Excel has no system variables related to trading....no OpenPositionProfit, MarketPosition, etc, etc...and let's not forget the circular buffers for all variables. Wow, that is something not even Ninja Trader has at the moment. So you must build this whole complex infrastructure in Excel via VBA and some clever programming.
Good Luck !

 

sounds like a set up to sell some excel system later...

 

lol....not a setup at all....just a couple of thoughts...))

 

yep..tracking the open positions can be tricky in excel...but i am talking here mostly about the ease of wiritng your ideas in code and immediately debugging them cell by cell as opposed to the way it is done in tradestation...I just want to say that excel is simply more straightforward in variable handling....you simply see everything there as you code..while in TS you would need to run the debugger and add those stop lines...

 

for example,,,i recently worked on creating the zigzag indicator in excel..the ts zigzag uses the small pivots while i wanted to use the raw price...the indicator logic is as follows:

You give it the minimum price length the price should move before it recognizes it as a leg. For example – 10 points. So it starts from the first price(e.g. 23) and keeps calculating the difference between it and the prices in the following bars before it sees a negative or positive distance of 10 or more points between the current bar’s high/low and the price it started with. Let’s say it found that the price is higher than 10 points than 23 - at 34.Now it changes the reference from the 23 to 34 and starts to look for downward or upward legs – to 44 and 23 respectively. When there are consecutive highs or lows the reference price is simply updated till an opposite leg is found. The junctures of opposite legs become zigzag pivots.

I do not know - maybe some people here would find it easy to code this in TS - I spent quite a while to implement it in excel - with dynamic maximums/minimums which would be very hard to programm in ts

 

just to demonstrate superior charting capabilities of excel when it comes to painting different conditions in the price action -I attached this image...
let me know what you think

 

After reviewing that spaghetti chart, my head hurt for hours !
It's way too much.