How to create my own index

Discussion in 'Trading Software' started by cunparis, Aug 25, 2008.

  1. rosy2

    rosy2

    you get EOD prices (or realtime) and then apply your index formula. you could use excel if you dont know anything else.
     
    #11     Aug 25, 2008
  2. I thought of Excel but I want to create oscillators and moving averages, etc. and I'd like to see them graphically. That'd be a lot of work for Excel.
     
    #12     Aug 25, 2008
  3. I looked at the custom tick indicator video. Seems like a hack, but maybe it's capable of more. They use an equation with variables LAST1 LAST2 LAST3 etc. What if I make the cunparis500? Do I have to code that up?

    What I'm looking for is to make a real index. Figure out how it's weighted (equal, market cap, etc.) and then do my indicators on it.

    IBD has the IBD100. Zweig used to have his own index. Well I want mine. :) It's not a vanity thing, I want to create my own industry groups and then do technical analysis on them and then further screen them for buy candidates. DJUS sectors have indexes but don't tell you the stocks in them. Others do but we can't modify them. Sometimes it's subjective if a stock belongs in one group or another, etc.

    I'm just curious how they did it. If Neoticker will do it then I guess it'd be worth getting the EOD version for this.
     
    #13     Aug 25, 2008
  4. raker

    raker

    Neoticker is specially built for the purpose of building specific equally weighted or weighted indicies without using their programming side of things . What I mean by this is they have a section called "user define manager" where by you have all the symbols of your index and you can set the weights at 1.00 (equal) or change the weightings individually how you want such as 1.2 ,5.7 or whatever . You can create any index with whatever symbols then you can put any indicator moving averages or stochastics or whatever and track it in realtime tick by tick without all the programming hassels ...

    As an example I trade the ES but sometimes find it a bit noisy because of the tick size (0.25) so i created my own index of s&p 90 stocks which correlates with the ES by about 97/98% and my index is updated every second with a much smoother resolution because it is composed of the stocks with the tick size measured in cents and dollars ...
     
    #14     Sep 2, 2008
  5. I'd recommend Amibroker. I use it to create all kinds of custom indices. It's a piece of cake to create them using the Add-to-composite feature. So basically what you do is just define a script for how the composite is calculated, then use the Add-to-composite to create the price data. From there you can easily graph the data and add standard and custom indicators. The EOD standard version is $199 and the community support is excellent.
     
    #15     Sep 2, 2008
  6. That depends - someone without much programming background will not like it, for those something like TS/EasyLanguge is probably the better choice. Others with more experience will like the possibility to do all programming in professional level IDEs like Visual Studio or other products (its nice to have a debugger for bigger projects for example). But its true, 10x time the effort compared to TS (as a novice programmer) is maybe right - but you get also get 10x the flexibility. Which is the better choice depends a lot of what a user tries to archive.
     
    #16     Sep 2, 2008
  7. I installed Amibroker and then found out that the demo won't allow saving files which makes it not very useful for me in my evaluation. Also the programming language using arrays is very strange to me. I'm sure I could get the hang of it, but for this specific purpose I don't see why I'd need to program.

    Plus Neoticker can do a lot of other things that I'd like to do. My research is pointing to neoticker. The stupid hardware USB key thing is putting me off.
     
    #17     Sep 4, 2008
  8. Tums

    Tums

    The USB thingy is a better alternative to "call home" softwares.
     
    #18     Sep 4, 2008
  9. I thought I'd update the thread with my status. My requirement has changed a bit, not only do I want to create my own index, but I want to run breadth indicators on it (for example advance/decline ratio) and not only that but I want to be able to use this in backtesting.

    So actually I'm looking for a backtesting platform that will let me do the custom breadth stuff.

    For backtesting I've narrowed it down to:

    neoticker
    genesis trade navigator
    ninjatrader

    unfortunately ninjatrader doesn't do the breadth stuff, at least not without a lot of programming.

    genesis - I haven't installed it yet. it can do custom indexes but the breadth stuff I do not know.

    I'm currently evaluating neoticker. If the user interface wasn't so clunky I'd be making more progress. I successfully created some breadth indicators using NeoBreadth. Now I'm working on trying to make a strategy based on them.

    So far neoticker is pretty powerful if one can get by the user interface issues. It's true it requires programming knowledge but so far it's minimal.

    InvestorR/T was ruled out just because I want a top notch backtesting platform. Amibroker is still in the list of candidates but that language is so far away from what I'm used to that I'm putting it off. ;)
     
    #19     Sep 7, 2008
  10. If you want more in depth information bout neoticker i suggest their own forum. I personally don't use the breath/UDS-stuff. There there are a few very sophisticated users who certainly can provide more insight how/if your ideas can be implemented.
     
    #20     Sep 7, 2008