I've been trading (mostly swing) for a couple of years and recently got into daytrading. I'm always getting ideas to program and backtest a trading strategy... But I have no background in computer programming, so I got esignal thinking EFS files could help, but its not that user-friendly. I've been able to modify a few strategies but thats about it. Would anyone know about where I should start? Maybe another software then esignal, or a class/seminar I could take... Please any advice would be appreciated
I've been porting code from TradeStation EL to E-Signal EFS & C++. TradeStation EL is an "easier" language to use; however, if you know nothing about programming, they all will require time and commitment. To a programming beginner, I'd recommend TradeStation EL. Get some books to show you samples, and tweak them. Tweaking samples is actually the best way to do a lot of programming, so don't feel too bad if you can't just write something from scratch. I've been writing software for years, and I will say that one thing is true: Most of the time, the sample code from a 3rd party software vendor is the best resource you have for figuring out how to implement something with their tools -- even better than their documentation, or books on the subject. My experiences with EFS -- ... EFS isn't bad, but I don't think I'd tell a newbie to use it. You aren't going to find a lot of books out there with examples in EFS. In fact, most of the good trading systems I found, I found the code for AMIBroker or TradeStation EL. I'd read that code, and then rewrite it in EFS. I use EFS because I use e-Signal, and not TradeStation. I'm not interested in the TradeStation platform. My EFS scripts are just complementary to my trading. They annotate my trading, and they do a lot of "nice" things. But for the serious trading-engine related stuff, I just flat out write everything in C++.
Thanks for the info Fatrat, do you find that esignal is better then Tradestation? Or should I just switch to Tradestation.. Also, If I can't switch and I'm stuck using esignal, do you have any books you can recommend? Or if I were to take a programming course just to at least have some foundation, which language should I learn? Cheers
I don't have too much basis for comparison on the actual software. I was giving you perspective from the programming language point of view. I just happen to "know" EL because most of the time that I borrow concepts, it's from code someone else wrote for EL. EL has lots of nice functions, and it's really easy to read. E-Signal isn't bad. It's not IDEAL, but it's not bad. If you want to learn programming for e-Signal, you can probably get a book on javascript. Beware that most of the time javascript is used, it's used for web applications. However, if you were to buy some javascript book and learned how to use javascript, .. the principles would be useful in e-Signal EFS.