1) If you purchase this but don't have a brokerage account with Tradestation, will you have access to Tradestation's historical intraday data for backtesting? 2) Can 2000i test historical intraday data (say 5 minute bars)? thanks.
I believe you may have historical data from the historical CD that come with 2000i but only until June 2000 and this may be only daily data. From 2001 to 2006 you will need to get daily and intra day data from vendors. Yes, you can back test 5 min bars but TS2000i does not support intrabar entry conditions...which may be a big deal for you but not for me. The major pain for 2000i is that you need to constantly update your data base via the Global Server.
Intrabar entry conditions can be very dangerous. Depending on your system, signals can be generated on a intrabar but disappear once the bars is completed. Which means that you entered on a false signal. This is no major pain to me. I have endless historical data on my own disk as TS2000 stores the data on my PC. I find this rather an advantage.
Depends what data, time intervals, (daily, intraday). Many have kept updating using tradestations free ''HistoryBank" database. Better to subscribe to esignal or dtn to update ts2000i There are also 3rd party programs to convert other formats in to global server format. But for simple backtesting, in many cases, data does not even need to go into global server. The charting program alone can read ANY format from ascii to metastock and telechart, excel, etc, etc. in daily and minute bars.
does this mean 2000i will give me data up to year 2000 in a cd, then i use the updates to download data up to present time? that would be awesome. can i download intraday data as well?