If you are addressing me with your magic little wave of the hand dismissal service.........then .....whatever. Actually, I have found that once you understand a market you don't need a backtest. You can scroll through the charts and find all the trades and write them down. I am suggesting here that you will spend less time and develop better systems doing that because while you are at it the chart will tell you things. While you are backtesting the chart won't tell you a thing, likely as not you will be building up negative energy because your computer is too slow, or you will find bugs in your own code after the fact. I've been an amateur programmer since 1974 when I discovered that I had to write my own diagnostics in order to repair a mini computer. I really, really, think I have a handle on the computer thing pretty much, just my guess but hey......... when you work from the chip and machine language level up to the EZLanguage/dll/Visual Basic level over 33 years, you get a handle on things and you understand what a computer really is and you compare it to what a human brain really is... the most complex structure in the universe. If you want to put your backtested thing up against the human brain, go for it.
You can scroll through the charts and find all the trades and write them down. ========================================= good it is the essence of trading but to have a practiced eye need a lot of work
I'm trying to get a second run of the 30 day trial as we speak They fixed it up to work with the dual core technology and I had a dual core waiting for install to the box so I'm sort of excited. I'll get the new mobo running and get to testing with MC. Tradestation needs a complete revamp of the way the strategy talks to the broker. With MC and IB I can get the trade status in in instant and account balance to the minute and my strategy can run by itself without worry of getting out of synch with reality.... I can set it up with an account drawdown stop in case something unexpected goes wrong and I have little to worry about. Multicharts had a trademanager at one point but they dumped it. Good decision on their part as TWS IS the trademanager. They are flexible in their thinking, hopefully they will be able to stay that way. They have offices in Russia, maybe they could open a brokerage there and we could all avoid the PDT I'm going to see if IB has an exchange or broker resident account balance drawdown stop order, if not I'll suggest it. That would be awesome, no worries about the automated system at that point, set it and forget it. I supervised an engineering lab back in the day when computers had incompatability problems. They made me very frustrated and I swore that I was going to master them and get them all working for me instead of the situation at the time where I was working for the computers.. I still have that philosophy.
my hat is off to anyone who can build a profitable trading system by looking at it. normally that is a sure loser.
I had my fill of problems with TS automated order system, and went with a FA account/clients at IB. I still use TS strategies, but use NinjaTrader for the interface with the TS strategies. I can trade multiple strategies and multiple accounts at IB....no problems. NinjaTrader keeps a record of all trades in a database and provides some nice stats of the trades via account, symbol, date, etc......excellent!