If I wanted to test a strategy between 2 stocks - for example RCL and CCL and see how one performed versus the other ahead of key dates (earnings, dividends) is there a free program i can use to make a strategy and see what the results would be for example, if I wanted to buy 100 shares of RCL and sell the same dollar value of CCL 3 days before the ex-dividend date, is there a program that can tell me the historical return of that strategy and perhaps allow me to play with the days ie (buy/sell 4 days before ex, 3 days before ex and 2 days before ex, and then the ideal period to exit the trade after the dividend is paid) Thank you in advance
Hi YSettle, there are a bunch of free programs out there, both free as in beer, and free as in speech. If you are looking for the latter, I am the maintainer of TuringTrader, which is well able to do what you are looking for. Cheers, Felix
Yes, if you sing up at collective2.com the first 2 weeks is free and you can practice/test your ideas...
It definitely takes work to learn how to code in Python but Quantopian is a very powerful free platform to test trading strategies. It will be frustrating at first learning to code in Python, but the effort will be well worth it. I think its one of the best skills at trader can have these days, and will only get more valuable as time goes on.
What you have proposed is a very simple strategy. On your place, I would download all data to Excel (prices + dates of events) and then do an analysis in plain, old and simple Excel.