I recently installed a version of TradeStation 2000i. Since I didn't manage to write a custom strategy yet, but I started to try out the strategies already available in TS 2000i. Did any of you try out standard TS 2000i strategies, too? What were your results? Are they worth watching?
Their worthless... as it says... all indicators, signals, and functions are for educational use only... Maybe the Pivot... might be worthsome...
As I recall the channel break system works ok for markets like bonds, eurodollars and currencies. Probably worked ok on stock indexes over last three or four years due to crazy trends, but historically these types of systems don't do well on the stock market.
The strategies in TS will at best give you ideas to expand upon and examples of how Easylanguage works. I would recommend you do the standard newbie thing. Get some data and try them all. See what looks like it might work, then optimize the hell out of it till it looks like a sure fire gift from God. Then try it on real time data and watch it self destruct. Now go back and look at your results in the strategy performance report. Add commission costs, add slippage, and deduct the largest winner. Deduct the largest two winners if there are more than fifty trades. Now you will have a better idea what you would have lost if you used the canned system. You will have learned much about TS and how it works. This is time well spent. If you are a legal owner go to TS website and read other users posts on system theory. Join Omegalist @ eskimo.com and read, search old posts, study others efforts. These will save you lots of time but will require a lot of time none the less. Do not buy add ons that sound too good to be true. Believe 1/3 of what you read and 1/2 of what you see unless it is from me. When I post take it as the Gospel Truth.
Thanks Chasmann for your 100% truth. Interestingly, how possibly we the newbies would have the required abilities to distinguish between the good part and the evil, as if only 1/3 of reading and 1/2 of seeing can be trusted?
That is where the work comes in. Are they trying to sell you something? Are they offering "secrets"? Did it sound too good to be true? Toss it out as BS. If it sounds reasonable, go to the websites I mentioned and do a search for it. See what others say, see if the logic of the principle make sense to anyone else. Code it in easylanguage and see what it will do with real data. If it is too hard to code it may be possible to make an indicator that will give you an idea of what it would do real time. In the end you will be best served to gain a bit of knowledge from everything you read, even if it is just the insight to discard the idea as nonsense or impractical for you.