Tahoe & rtstrading: I agree that several of the issues can be worked around. Let me clarity two of my points: systems & alerts: I know that the mov example was simple and there is a simple workaround. If you have multiple components in the signal the proposed work-around may not work. e.g Mov(c,5,s) > Mov(c,20,s) and h > ref(hhv(h,10),-1). There is no guarantee that both condition will turn true at the same time so Cross will not do the trick. entry price: I meant in the system tester. I would like to be able to code the following exit: entryPrice + 3*ATR(10) for instance. For trading ES/NQ MS Pro is probably a very good choice. It really breaks down if you trade multiple issues simultaneously
Tahoe, I currently am using ver. 7.02. I found an error in the Linear Regression Slope that Equis was to have fixed for the 1st maintenance update to 7.2, but when I received the CD it was not fixed. They are aware of this problem, but until it is fixed I must stay with 7.02 which is correct. I use esignal and am not familar with the Quote.com setup. The esignal intraday data is in 1 minute format and saved on your hard drive in a cache for intraday data. Currently, only the past two weeks is available, so your testing/optimizing will be limited until you can accumulated sufficient data. The cache can save up to 65,000 minutes of data. I use the Downloader and delete all night data, ie I only save the high volume data from 6:30am - 1:30 pm (pst) daily. This will allow about 7 months of 1 minute data to be saved. The 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 minute charts are derived from this data. The esignal equities version, which will give you the eminis, is available for $79/month on an annual basis. IB - The round turn is $2.95 x 2 = $5.90 RT Minimum account for futures is - $5250 which is the initial margin for the NQ. You will need to maintain the account at $4200 for any trade taken. Email- I do not use the email or pager alert in the Experts. I may someday if I plan to have a broker trade my system for me. I would rather have a software tie to a trade platform like IB's or the J-Trader to automate the trades. The people at www.efloortrade.com have done this with Tradestation and the J-Trader, but not Metastock. Good luck trading!
Vikana, Tahoe, et. al I know this isn't a Metastock coding thread, but just in case anyone reading this is wondering, there is a way to do what you want with regards to more complex signals (and you may already be aware of it). You can use the "Alert" function to look for multiple criteria. Using the above example you could say: Alert(cross(mov(c,5,s),mov(c,20,s)), 5); This will return a true value if the moving averages cross during the last 5 bars. You can then look for other criteria to occur while this is true. I apologize if my coding syntax is off a little, I've been using TradeStation lately and my brain is in EasyLanguage mode, and not MS formula language, but I think that is right. I do, however, agree with some of the other limitations of the MS language. That is why I made the switch to TS. FWIW, Kirk
For the Buy Alert in an Expert: BUY:= name of your formula for buy conditions SELL:= name of your formual for sell conditions BUY AND BarsSince(Ref(buy,-1))>BarsSince(Ref(sell,-1)) For the Sell Alert use the same except the Buy becomes sell, etc. This will produce an alert for only the last buy/sell signal...not all including any followup signals.
I guess this turned into more of a debate than I expected. I'm well aware of how to work around the limitations of Alerts etc. My real beef is "why do we have to do this?". Metastock pro is being marketed as a realtime trading tool and I cannot even run systems in realtime continuously and automatically. That is both silly and deceptive marketing. 'nuff said.
Yahoo hosts a fairly active Metastock users group: MetastockUsers. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com and join metastockusers. That's another good place for advice and help
An idea that might help with the RT performance of Metastock: If you are running several charts with Experts in a workspace, make sure to load the minimum number of bars that you need to run your indicators. This will speed up the performance considerably. (When you first open the chart, select periods to load on the Options....dropdown, or once the chart is opened, just double click on the date/time axis (abscissa) and reset the dates to something shorter. Save it all as a layout so you don't have to do this every time you open the charts.) Also, if you aren't running Win2000 or NT, and you are trading in real time, you should consider the upgrade. I went from Win98SE to Win2000Pro, and everything improved tremendously. My system ran faster and all of the historical glitches cleared up immediately. Minimum RAM is 128Meg, although I increased it to 256Meg, and now 512Meg. I used to use Metastock Pro 7.03 in realtime with Quote.com/Dynastore which worked very well. The pager features worked very well on my cell phone. I no longer use Metastock. I've switched to Tradestation 4 and 2000i, primarily because of EasyLanguage. But I'd say the graphics and charting of Metastock are superior. It's too bad about the Formula Language limitations though......
Another performance suggestion is to only run Experts at the end of each bar vs on every tick. Depending on system that might be an option. Makes a big difference for active securities.
Here are a couple the addresses for the Yahoo groups: http://www.clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/equismetastock http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Metastockusers/messages/
Also, you can check out the Equis supported mail list for Metastock. It's fairly active as well: http://www.equis.com/customer/support/faqs/ge00004.html