Newbie Tradestation Questions

Hi Hypostomus,

My apologies also to Adamoptions for hijacking the thread.

1. Data
eSignal currently only has 60 days of intra-day data, though they plan to increase this to 100 days in the next release and two years eventually. However, this two years will be in two years time when they have physically collected all the data! Compare this to TradeStation which is now offering 10-20 years of intra-day data. I just don’t believe you can really backtest anything with only 60-100 days of data. Even two years is the minimum you could use – though I supposed everyone will have their own opinions.

2. Time Zone problems
This is probably specific to Europe and to particular strategies. Europe changes its clocks (forward in spring, backward in the autumn/fall) a week different from the US. Normally New York opens at 2.30pm and closes at 8.30pm (UK time) but during these two weeks it opens at 3.30pm and closes at 9.30pm. If I have time constraints around my trading – e.g. don’t trade before 3.30pm – then my strategy will fail during those two weeks. I believe TradeStation overcome this problem by allowing you to specify the exchange time in your strategy rather than your local time.

3. ‘Zero Volume Bar’ problem
Bring up three eSignal Advanced Charts and set them to five minute intervals. Set one to ‘$COMPQ’, one to ‘YM #F’, and one to ‘ES #F=2’. Create an efs function ...

function main() {
return close("$COMPQ");
}

... and apply this function to your charts. Go back to 7th October at 11.00am New York time. Check the value of $COMPQ in each of your charts. On my chart the '$COMPQ' chart has the $COMPQ at 1889.29, the ‘YM #F’ chart has the $COMPQ at 1880.63 and the ‘ES #F=2’ chart has the $COMPQ at 1898.35. eSignal has the correct value of the $COMPQ (1889.29) but it is unable to display it properly on other charts – and this happens also when you backtest. I believe this problem occurs with most combinations of instruments, even things as simply as using the TRIN and VIX. It makes a nonsense of backtesting results because these values will change again maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. It is close to random.


I have complained bitterly to eSignal about these problems. The only response I have ever received was that they have 'no plans to resolve these issues'. Usually they just ignore me.

Cheers

mmillar