We use Wealth Lab for system testing because it summarizes performance over multiple securities, has several powerful coding "shortcuts", and has a one-time licensing cost. WL has a lot steeper learning curve than something like the Market Information Machine (http://www.lim.com/docs/Xmim/Default.htm) but it's not $3000/month either. We've published a free custom quick start guide for EGM members that's been really successful in reducing that curve and also provide custom coding for those who want a quick fix. It's amazing how many seemingly profitable strategies don't work with consistency, and you never know until you test. - Rob
I have no affiliation with any software and I'm a pure opportunist. I just want to make money in the markets and I'll use whatever tool will help me do it. Tradestation, amibroker, metastock, etc was not able to provide the help I needed: - testing on baskets of securities - easily switching from daily data to minute data (I do a lot of trades that start at the open and conclude by end of day and I like to know at what points during the day the trade ends). - automated trading - aggregating groups of stocks into an index and doing tests on that index (great for stat arb trades with baskets of stocks vs NQ) - I have a team of people, some with no programming experience, that need to test up to 100 ideas a day (between close one day and open the next). - easy to modularize and reuse code and ideas Wealth-lab has satisfied for over 3 years. If there's something better, even for 10 times the cost, I would certainly use it. But there isn't. - James Altucher
WL was not designed for it but I am experimenting with charting and system trading spreads as a trend move. It actually charts spreads and you can program it so the signals are given on the spread differential as the chart shows. I was missing this feature from spread charting software where all you can do is look at what happened.