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[amibroker] Backtesting Tip



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I'm only offering this "tip" since I was finding it very difficult to
achieve what I was trying to do.   Now that I've managed to streamline the
process, I thought that I would share my approach.  Like most things that I
do, this will not be of interest to everyone here.

Here is my situation:

1.  I backtest over 10 to 12 years of data.
2.  I backtest my systems against all active and extinct stocks (13,000+).
3.  I rely on my filtering to ignore stocks of no interest (low volume, low
price, etc.).
4.  I would NEVER have more than one parameter set across all stocks.

The problems arising from this approach are:

1.  Excessive amount of time required to test/optimise/backtest entire
universe.
2.  AmiBroker limitation of 10,000 stocks residing in cache exacerbates this
problem.
3.  Since I generally optimize/backtest over all of my data, I have nothing
left to test out-of-sample.


So, I want to have two randomly selected watchlists.   One for designing,
testing and optimising plus one for seeing how results look out-of-sample.


I'm embarassed to tell you how I was making my random lists.  But I will
tell you how I am doing it now:


1.  I create an exploration with this code in it:

	Filter = 1;
	AddColumn (Random(),"random");

2.  I run this exploration against "all" stocks (excluding composites,
indices, etc.).

3.  I then sort the results of the exploration by my "random" column.

4.  I then highlight the first half of the stocks (random = 0.00 to 0.49).

5.  I then click on "add selected results to watch list" and select a watch
list to use.

6.  I then highlight the reamining half of the stocks (random = 0.50 to
0.99).

7.  I then click on "add selected results to watch list" and select the
second watch list to use.

8.  I then rename my watchlists to something like "first half" and "second
half".


I now have one watchlist for using for research and one for testing
out-of-sample.


No doubt there is a better way to achieve all of this, but it is a 100%
improvement on the way I was doing it.


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