Hi, I've been reading about strategy trading and I think I'm ready to try out trade station. But I'm a little confused about something. I thought Tradestation was a stand alone software package. When I go to the Tradestation site, it looks like I have to make Tradestation my broker. Is this true? I already have a futures account that says they accept tradestation strategies. Can I use them instead of Tradestation?
If you want to learn strategies and programming of same you could get TS2000, get the original tutorial manuals with it and play with that for awhile. The latest Tradestation is TS7, the language is not a lot different, you won't have difficulty making the change should you ever.
...permit me to offer another "option". E-Signal has a perfectly good backtesting capability for less than TS without their brokerage client discount. If you are an IB or MBT client, E-Signal will give you a discount. It's a po' boy solution. Disclaimer: the money goes one way, only from me to E-Signal. It appears that I am in the minority here re E-Signal, but I find its Java extension coding to be very natural. Any questions will be cheerfully answered. Best regards. - Mike
'fraid I have to totally disagree about eSignal being good for backtesting. It has a great backtesting language but the data just isn't there. I believe they currently only have about 100 days of intraday data, their time-zone management is terrible (so if, like me, you're in Europe you can't be sure what time of day eSignal are talking about), and they have a recognised problem (which they have no plans to fix) called the 'Zero Volume Bar' which means you can't reliably compare one instrument against another. I love eSignal as a real time charting package but for backtesting it sucks.
...and apologies to Adamoptions, don't mean to highjack your thread, but thanks for the observations on E-Signal. You are correct that E-Signal's intraday data is shorter at 60 days than TS's two years, but ES supposedly is expanding. I am in California and the time zoning works, but maybe counting backward is easier than counting forward. What is the Zero Volume Bar problem? I've never noticed a problem, but I never use volume in backtesting. Thanks and good trading. - Mike
Yes, you can use your broker instead of tradestation. There is a different fee (higher) for TS if you don't have a brokerage account with them, though. Some people just place a minimum amount of money with TS and then pay the lower fee....