Pattern Recognition and Backtesting

Discussion in 'Trading' started by Rigel, Sep 29, 2001.

  1. Rigel

    Rigel

    I've been going through charts for a couple of weeks bar by bar and and accumulating data on several stocks to try to identify patterns. For instance, I'll start back 1000 bars and record the duration and percentage increase and decrease of every uptrend and downtrend etc. in order to identify a possible pattern. Then I test the possible pattern with the last 200 bars to see if it produces a positive expectancy. For instance, to identify the top of a trend I might decide to call the top of a trend a bar where the HOD is greater than the the previous 15 or more HOD's and greater than the succeeding 10 or more HOD's. The software would then print out a list that gave the duration and percentage increase or decrease of each trend. I don't need (or want) realtime data but would need to be able to load a database of historical data to use in the analyses. I also do some distribution curves but I can do this with a math program (Maple). Is there any software/service I can buy that would allow me to automate this so I didn't have to do it by hand?
    Thanks & Regards
    Rigel
     
  2. tntneo

    tntneo Moderator

  3. Another one is Metastock at http://www.metastock.com

    It's showing it's age and is really not effective for accurate simulation of intraday trading (no limit or stop orders for instance)

    AmiBroker at http://www.amibroker.com is supposed to be good as well
     
  4. hsanson

    hsanson

    Rigel:

    Try Neoticker Real Time v 2.2 at www.tickquest.com


    Their Neoticker software allows intraday identification of patterns you specify from previous charts. Then you can save that pattern in a file and start a scan of the whole basket of stocks you have for that particular pattern you selected and saved.
    Neoticker is a pretty cool software and has 3 programming languages built in (JavaScript, VBA and Delphi Script). It uses Quote.com data feed as well as other data feeds such as esignal.
    There is a limited demo of their software that only allows you to use just 1 chart and limits you to 30 days of trial time.


    hsanson
     
  5. Rigel

    Rigel

    Thanks
     
  6. Anybody here trading with Tradestation Securities? They offer futures trading and I am interested in the platform capability to generate trades automatically according to one's system. That could be an edge for daytrading the emini's. Just curious to hear your experience, commissions are high and there is a 50K min. balance, so I am not really thinking about trading with them anyway.
     
  7. Disclaimer: The following is based on using TradeStation about a year ago:

    I found TradeStation highly unstable. A resource and processor hog that never ran for a day without some sort of technical problem. Before signing up I'd recommend visiting one of the user groups on Yahoo or the email list (I can find the info if anyone is interested).

    Personally, I'd never trade with software based on TradeStation. Have no idea of how good the brokerage is.
     
  8. the same here. i use the prosuite and i can tell you that the tradestation or the whole prosuite makes your system comletly unstable. it´s a very very lagre program that uses almost all your cpu resources and crashes your system at least once a day.

    use it for screening or strategy backtesting - thats ok imho. but never use it as an automated tradingplatform that generates orders itself. much too risky...

    kev //
     
  9. I concur . Tradestation is a blunt tool, not a system to trade with. It crashes frequently and is the resource hog of all time.

    There really (imho) is no commercially available program out there - I've resorted to excel, access, sybase and programming for my systems.

    If anyone has seen a commercial system that works, please let us know.
     
  10. I used tradestation since version 1.0. version 4.0 with futuresource sat feed was the absolute ultimate in futures trading. Then came TS2000. As other posters have commented, it had major problems and really was not stable enough, particularly with an internet feed, for realtime use, which was the whole reason you would get it in the first place. The idea of using tradestation to place automatic trades is downright frightening.
     
    #10     Oct 1, 2001