I'm looking for a good backtesting software, by good I mean one with lots of flexibility which lets you program the signals yourself. I'm currently evaluating AmiBroker but wonder if anyone has experience with other systems? I don't care for features like charting capabilities or automated trading or whatever, I'm only interested in the backtesting part of the system. I would need to be able to program my own signals both for long and short positions and also to be able to define signals for stop loss. By defining stop loss signals I mean I want to tell the system to exit my position based on a certain rule (say moving average crossover) instead of only saying "trailing stop 5 points" or "maximum loss stop loss 3%". So this means I need to define three (3) signals: a BUY signal, a SELL signal and a STOP LOSS signal (and of course three similar, but not necessarily the opposite, signals for going short). Any suggestions for backtesting software? Thanks!
Razor how do you like AB so far ? TradersStudio is one you might consider also . Murry is on here alot . I havent seen any reviews though in the software section on it . It looks like that could be a possibility though .
AmiBroker's programming language is a nice one, since I've been doing programming in various C-family programming languages I felt at home with the syntax. I recently installed AmiBroker and so will continue my evaluation but at first glance I don't think that AmiBroker gives me the flexibility to define a stop loss rule other than the usual "trailing" and "max n% loss" and so on. I want to define a stop loss rule in a similar way as you would define the buy/sell/short/cover rules. I looked around a little bit on tradestation.com but can't see from their web site whether TradeStation would be able to let me define stop loss rules as mentioned. And personally I prefer the syntax of AmiBroker's programming language instead of TradeStation's. But the programming language is not the crucial part here, its what the system lets me do that is most important.
Tradestation will allow you to program your own stoploss rules based on any definable criteria. You just need to test for your moving average crossover each bar, then if your condition is true, reset your stoploss accordingly.
Thanks guys. I'll look into TradeStation and Traders Studio. For now I'll experiment a little bit more with AmiBroker. Tomasz, I understand that you set up the sell signal by using the keyword "Sell" but what I had in mind was the following: 1. Buy = ...some signal... 2. Sell = ...some other signal... 3. StopLoss = ...yet another signal different from the Sell-signal in bullet 2... So when I get the Buy signal then I'm in buy mode and will sell when Sell signal is activated. However, as a stop loss I want to use a third signal. So I'll be out of my position either when the Sell or StopLoss activates. Attention: Sell and StopLoss would have different activation logic. I realize now that I'll probably be able to set this up by only using the Sell keyword if I check for my stop loss condition with an if statement and then forcing the sell if my stop loss logic activates. Am I correct on this one? Will have to try it out.
I don't know if this applies exactly but the software I use to scan just released a feature called an Odds Maker which lets you test any strategy.
Ah great, being able to OR conditions seems like solving my issues. If I OR two conditions will I also be able to tell from code which of my conditions actually triggered to exit my position?
Doesn't look like the stuff I'm looking for at the moment but nevertheless the software seems like a good idea. Have you used the backtesting feature of the program yourself?