Sorry but I viewed this as an attack on me, that is what upset me. I do understand your point about the bouncing tick problem. I am sorry if I offended you. My point was on 1 min bars ,your backtest results will be good enough to see if the system is good enough to consider trading or not. The 1 min bars will not cause you to fail, If the system continues to work like your backtests you will be fine. I have developed many systems which entered at the open or off of the open and I originally develop them using daily bars and sneaking a peak at the next bars open. You can do this but then just not allowing a protective stop on the entry (bar) day. You need to realize these limitations and develop your system knowing you can't place protect stops on the bar of entry or play games with target profits on the bar of entry. The backtested results going forward and the real results , if we allow for realistic slippage which is $300.00 on a big S&P500 contract were very similar. Our produce has many advances for example you can develop money management rules mixing intra-day and end of day systems. It is all integrated and available at a mouse click. We also did a lot of work to make sure we handled multiple contracts and scaling correctly , because TradeStation really does not do it the way most traders would expect.
I agree with Rachel> As a trader who is working on high frequency systems along with longer term Trend systems, the tick data to is quite important and I think is worth getting 6 months of that for your product. You say that testing should go back 5 to 6 years but a few would work out? That is faulty in my book, it not about the time frame, but the environment and the market conditions that count. My system that worked in 2000 with average range of 20 points is not going to come close to the current environment of 10 points. I want to test my system in all market conditions, up down and consolidating than confirm it is robust to turn on.
Thanks for the Update. Will you be sending out an email to those who have registered on your site advising of the release? Also, Do you know of any reviews that have been written on Traders Studio? Also, Also, will you consider offering a trial period on the software?
Yes we will be doing a email to all people who are registered on the site. In terms of a review, we wanted to wait until we have the real time version available since magazines like to wait 2-3 years between reviews. We are going to offer a demo version of the product after 2.0 is released. We are also increasing the price after the release of 2.0. We do offer a 30 day return policy so you could order now for $499.00 and get the free upgrade to 2.0.
I thought I would throw in my two cents. I have been away a while, so please be gentle........ A person very close to me has been very involved recently in the testing of TradersStudio, both version 1 and 2. I have seen both and played with version 1 a little on his system and I think it has very strong potential. It is still in need of further development, but it could be a real gem. What Mr. Ruggerio has been saying is 100% correct, in my opinion, for a long term or intermediate term system. When you're tesing with tick data, you're looking to exploit very short term inefficiencies, so looking back five years (or even two for that matter) is irrelevant. A tick-data system is essentially at the whim of the underlying market, and as we all know, markets constantly and rapidly change. Tesing at that frequency is frought with all sorts of challenges, and I don't personally know of any reasonable packages that test tick data well. Tradestation can do that, but most likely not at the sophistication level that would be needed; you may need to seek out a custom solution. As for long- or intermediate-term testing, I think TradersStudio could easily rival Tradestation as a testing solution. Its language is a close variant of Visual Basic 6, so it's not as easily learned at Easylanguage. Also, it is a tesing platform, so it doesn't rival TS as far as a overall trading platform. However, its portfolio-level system testing is by far the best I've seen for intermediate or long term system testing. The only big beef I have with it (and this is from my limited experience with version 1) is the optimization process is HORRIBLY slow. A system of moderate complexity with 12 markets of 20 years worth of daily data, using about 200 testing iterations, might take a couple of hours on a decent modern system. However, my understanding is the new version is drastically more efficient. In short, I think TradersStudio is definately worth looking at, at the very least for a short audition. I am not familiar with TradingBlox, but I have tried just about every other standard platform, and I think TradersStudio has great promise. As a disclaimer, I should mention I used Tradestation for several years, and therefore everything else that I use is compared to it (I still think it's the best overall platform out there, even with its testing flaws). I am not a TradersStudio, an my experience with it is based on using it over a weekend on my friend's system.
Do you currently use TradingBlox? Care to post a review? It sounds good from the website but without hearing from an actual user i'm hesitent to pay $2000+; especially when you can't try out the software ahead of time.
I have used Trading Blox since its inception as Veritrader. I am a long term trend follower. I was using Trading Recipes originally but would feel completely "blind" going back to such a product now. The GUI of Trading Blox is superb: run a test and look through each trade of each future. Run another test - perhaps a longer or shorter term version of the first test. Compare trade by trade the longer and shorter term version of your system: see what difference it makes when you widen out the stops or reduce the moving average lengths or whatever. It is visually so easy to get a comprehension of the strategy you are testing: each time series will be laid over with your indicators. Each trade will be listed as well as shown on charts. The stepped parameter facility is essential and devastatingly revealing. Take a dual moving average: run every parameter of the short MA from 50 to 100 in 5 day increments and for the long MA from 100 to 400 in 20 day increments - 176 different test runs. Choose a portfolio of 50 or 100 or 150 different futures. Run the tests over 20 years of data - or more. Perhaps in 5 or ten year periods at a time. See how shorter term trends have decreased in viability as time has progressed and market participation increased. Cook up almost any money management scheme you can think of - you will be able to code and test it. Dynamic portfolio management likewise. The latest feature the team are adding is a in-built Monte Carlo analysis facility. It has bells and whistles and endless flexibility. Short of writing your own programme (which might take you a while) you won't find much better than this. At present TBB is only for end of day data. I believe at some stage a future version is planned for intra day data - if you are a shorter term trader - enquire. Take a long, good , hard look at the product. Perhaps Curtis and Tim still offer a demo version - I'm not sure. I have used the product to test extensively. I use the product to produce my orders. It is worth every penny. Don't get the cut down version - get the top of the range fully programmable one. It is worth every penny!
I just ran the same test on TBB and it took 2:58 (two minutes fifty eight seconds) for 12 markets of 20 years worth of data using 200 iterations. I ran this test on a two-year-old 2.6 Ghz Pentium 4 machine. I haven't used TradersStudio so I can't compare the two.