I am looking for a trading software which I can use to program and portfolio trade a system. Ideally the software would allow me to portfolio trade dynamically. By that I mean: 1) system scans different symbols to issue trading signals; 2) positions are sized as a function of maximum risk percentage of current portfolio equity; 3) system's portfolio management adjusts portfolio equity dynamically to market positions and also allows for cash adjustments (deposits and withdrawals). In short I am asking here for a software that enables to program, backtest and trade a "complete" portfolio management and trading system. Perhaps I am asking too much I know. But I hope there are cheaper solutions out there other then Mechanica software (www.mechanicasoftware.com). I also guess that in order to build such a software myself I would have to spend years learning how to program software, right? Any suggestions?
The answer is simple. It's TradersStudio 2.5 . TradersStudio can do anything Mechanica can do in terms of portfolio level testing and Money and Trade Management. Duplicating some of Mechanica Features might require a little coding in our script language but for only $599.00, it well worth it. In addition TradersStudio can do many things Mechanica can't, for example when optimizing a portfolio you can look at the combined results or individual results with just a mouse click without rerunning the optimization. In addition TradersStudio supports Walk Forward optimization and analysis which can generate trading signals for tomorrow. TradersStudio is not an end of day product but really a off line version which supports intra-day testing down to one minute bars. We currently have a real time version in beta and existing customers will get a large discount on this version when it becomes available. Here is a link to a overview of TradersStudio http://www.tradersstudio.com/Overview/tabid/68/Default.aspx We have also put up a video which is a brief overview of testing a system on a portfolio. http://www.tradersstudio.com/Tutorials/Videos/tabid/167/Default.aspx
Which Mechanica Features are you talking about? Does your software provide a complete solution for portfolio trading and management? Thanks.
Yes it does, you can test not only a system on a portfolio but a portfolio of systems using a single trading account. You can test advance money management concepts including rebalancing of a portfolios. You can also limit exposer by sector. Some of these type of features might require 10 or 15 lines of code in TradersStudio where Mechanica might do it in 4 or 5. TradersStudio can also trade international futures and automatically do the conversion and give you results for a mix portfolio of US and international futures in dollars. One advantage is our language is very similar to Excel VBA so many people already are familiar with it. We also have many addins available for TradersStudio, such as CycleStudio ,Neural Network addin , genetic algorithm addin and many more. TradersStudio also has full OLE capabilities with Excel, This is not even available in the standard version of Mechanica , only the more advance $25,000 version.
TradersStudio Basic Macro Language can fully control excel. It can open excel , load workbooks, run any VBA code available to Excel. TradersStudio can create worksheets and write and format data in Excel. It follows the full OLE standard. We wrote simple functions which you can call from TradersStudio to control excel so it does not require a technical understanding of OLE.
I have heard that www.powerst.com is a good choice. Indeed it looks like an excellent solution. Quite expensive though. Also, does anyone know www.tradingblox.com?
I have been on ET for over a year. I purchased TradersStudio after reviewing my options for several months. I looked at all of the products that claim to be portfolio backtesting solutions. These products cost from 5 times to as much as 25 times more than I paid for TradersStudio. As I recall, I paid $499 when I purchased it. Like most small traders, I could not have afforded to buy a $25,000 product without seriously damaging my ability to trade. I could have bought a $3,000 product if I had thought it could have done what I wanted better than TradersStudio. What Murray is telling people on ET is true. TradersStudio does have full portfolio level backtesting. You can test multiple systems and apply advanced money management and allocation strategies. A little coding is required to develop the money management strategies but the new programming wizard is a big help. Also, TradersStudio's support has always been there when I needed to figure out how to do something. I like the new add-in products that are coming out for TradersStudio. I have purchased some of them when I wanted a new toy to play with. A trading platform with add-ins is something I always liked about TradeStation. It seems that none of the other platforms, like TradeBlox has an active add-in market like TradersStudio. It may be hard to believe, but this low cost product has allowed me to do everything I wanted and even try things I see in the feature list of higher cost products. Don't let the fact that it is not as expensive as other platforms fool you: TradersStudio is full-featured. If I want to do something, I ask 'support' how and they point me in the right direction. I don't understand why TradersStudio is sold for so little. I was told by Steve , who is in support. that Murray builds these features for his own research and has made it available to traders to offset the development costs. Good Trading!
Agtrader777, thanks for your feedback. I am not familiar with TraderStudio. So what I am asking is: May I use it for actual portfolio trading (not backtesting) and management? Actual portfolio trading and management requires the ability to program the software to issue trading signals, size positions dynamically taking into account current portfolio equity and also allowing for cash adjustments like deposits, withdrawals, and also position adjustments out of risk management or cash adjustments. What I am saying is that there are a lot of good software out there for portfolio backtesting. But most of them doesn't seem to be designed for actual portfolio trading and management. It looks like most software developers assume that nobody is gonna trade what they are backtesting. This is quite strange.