All my trading strategies are in Easy Language. I was looking at purchasing another piece of backesting software to verify my results. How hard is it to convert EasyLanguage to AFL? Do you just rewrite your strategies from scratch and if so how do you know you are comparing apples to apples?
AFL is tough to learn. Its an array based language so its completely different from EL. I end up rewriting the strategies from scratch, but, once you learn AFL its a more concise language than EasyLanguage. Checking trades in your backtest report is a way to check for integrity, but, using consistent data is the real key. The main benefit is in taking intraday data from TS (and whomever) and producing a filtered database for AB. This often produces more accurate reports in AB as TS doesn't let you easily edit the data files (many of which are inaccurate).
Nobody willing to help with my original questions? Ideally you need to compare TS and AB and more just to make sure. However, TS doesn't have trials, so I cannot make decision before I buy it...
I would suggest posting the Amibroker mailing list with questions rather than here. But if you look in Help, do a search on "futures mode" and you'll see a whole page describing testing with futures. Hope this helps.
Technically speaking, AMIBroker is incredible. It is compact and that allows it to run entirely in the processor cache memory. That makes it very, very fast. Tickzoom claims it's the speed king but the only software that they don't include in their comparison matrix is AMIBroker...
A gazillion years ago I used supercharts and upgraded to the last Tradestation platform they issued (2000i) before they shut it down and required you to migrate to their brokerage to use tradestation (or purchase it on subscription). I took a hiatus from trading for a few years (business busy, family/kids, not enough time to devote to it) and came back. I was never thrilled with the robustness of TS's backtesting which seemed to me to take shortcuts that made your backtesting seem more profitable than it was going to be in the real world. At the time, everyone seemed to be saying the same thing, and complained that TS didn't upgrade their product. So, I migrated to Amibroker. I have found Amibroker's current incarnation to be superior to TS, so I use it. I think its interesting to claim AB is a toy - that's what I thought about TS at the time. If you were comparing AB to Trading Blocks, maybe that's a fair comparison. And if you are doing HFT, you shouldn't be using AB anyway. AB is better for a swing trader, prop trader, or position trader. But its analysis package is more than robust. I am planning on staying with AB for the immediate future. It has a HORRENDOUS learning curve. Better be familiar with programming. But if I was going HFT or institutional prop, I would probably make the move over to trading blocks from what I have gleaned on this board.
TS is easy to learn. I once tried AB and I gave up. Maybe it is a good program but not for a trader, maybe for programmers. The same goes for Ninja and all other programs based on c#. Something else: I do not think that any serious trading software designer should include a function for downloading data from yahoo!, It means he does not know or does not understand that the data there is not realiable. More importantly: when some of you here will finally understand that backtesting is a thing of the past that does no longer work? Are you so silly or you are just programmers with no real system trading experience?
Not sure why you think Trading Blox would be better for HFT - it really isn't geared towards that and is much more geared toward futures trading - it was created to program the Turtle system. As for institutional prop - I'm not sure I see a huge advantage there either - in either case you'd be programming systems and then trading on the prop platform. Trading Blox however is an excellent package.
If people want to download and test for free with data from Yahoo, what's the problem? Their data isn't that unreliable. And AB includes connectors to most data providers - so I don't see this as an issue. Your comment about backtesting shows that perhaps you've had no success with backtesting of systems - I personally have. I do not view it as an automatic success, and I expect my systems, in the future, will likely stop working as the market changes. Of course, now I am programming systems to adapt to different types of markets. I'm guessing from your comments that you are a trader and not a programmer.
A lot of wrong writing and lack of understanding what is backtesting for in this thread. AB is one of better backtesting packages that now exist. In some features - excellent. Unfortunately the "experts" are comming only for bashing the SW.