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A few comments in-line, others may have more detailed replies...
--- In amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "caternore" <caternore@xxx> wrote:
>
> Hello Amibroker Community. I am thinking about purchasing Amibroker. I have a few questions I would like to ask the community before I decided whether or not I should purchase Amibroker . I know that most of my question have been ask before or that they have been explain on the amibroker website. But because of my past experience with other programs such as Metastock. I decided to ask these question anyway to insure I understand the capabilities of Amibroker.
>
> 1) How Does Amibroker back testing capabilities compare to other back testing software such as Tradingbloxs and Traderstudio? Pro or Cons?
When evaluating backtesters, the biggest differentiators that I came accross were:
A) Full portfolio support
B) Ability to reference foreign symbol
C) Processing speed
Specifically, most backtesters only work upon a single symbol. They generally do not allow for the dynamics of investing among a pool of symbols, including all the money management that might preclude taking a position in symbol ZZZ due to positions having already been taken in XXX and YYY. Of those that have some kind of portfolio support, some have artificial limitations as to how many symbols you can have in a portfolio. Amibroker supports full portfolio backtesting and allows as many symbols as you have data for.
Referencing foreign symbols is another area that very few backtesters support. For example; when evaluting symbol ZZZ, very few backtesters will allow you to at that time make a comparisson against YYY. In other words very few products would let you have a rule to only buy ZZZ if the volume for YYY was greater than some value.
Amibroker is by far the fastest backtester that I evaluated. Backtests that would have to run over night using other products (and eventually fail due to out of memory errors), would take under 30 minutes in Amibroker. I never did find another one that could do portfolio backtesting with foreign symbol reference across 8000 symbols using end of day data. Most were written in C# or C++ and relied on looping which ate up all the memory for many symbols over a long duration of data.
> 2) Is Amibroker capable of testing every aspect of the exact trading system outlined by the Original Turtles System to include Turtle Money Management, Correlated Market Risk Limits ,N-based Unit Sizing ,N-based Multiunit Position Additions ,Simultaneous Blends of System One and System Two , and The "Last Trade is Loser" rule?
I haven't coded those particular scenarios. But, I would be surprised if there was something in there that you could not do. However, it might take some fairly advanced coding skills, which is the main complaint that people have against Amibroker.
>
> 3) I have a system that trades equities on an end of day time frame. Basically It finds the direction of the market (S@x 500, Dow 30, Nasdaq, NYSE.), then find sectors and subsectors that are moving into the same direction of the market. Then chooses the top rank stock in these same subsectors. My system includes various money management and position sizing algorithms. Could I back test a system such as this on data back to the 1950?
It can be done. But, it would require some advanced coding skills and would suffer performance issues compared to simpler strategies. Any time you want to rank anything, you will pay a performance penalty. This is true regardless of what product you use.
>
> 4) Speaking of data what data providers does the community at a whole recommend for end of day trading. I am looking for the cleanest, and longest ( as in years) Data. I am also look for data that is already setup in sectors and subsectors (or industries and sub industries) as far back as the data goes? (Not sure if Amibroker does this automatically)
I've personally used Worden Brothers TeleChart 2007 and Norgate Premium Data. Both have worked well. Both have sectors and subsectors. Both offer a long history of historical data (Premium Data goes back to 1950 for a one time fee). AmiBroker does not do the sector assignment for you.
> 5) In Amibroker is it possible to have these various metrics defined by various time frames.
AmiBroker does have multi time frame support.
> 6) Can Amibroker chart for visual inspection, the various custom and non custom back testing metrics on various user define time frame during anytime in the back test?
I'm not clear on what you are asking for here. The answer will really depend on what it is that you want. Anything that you cause to be generated during a backtest can be seen on a chart. But, it would be up to you to persist the value and to write the chart code that would display the persisted value.
> 7) In Amibroker when I do a back test is it possible to view, compare and chart any market, Sector, Industries or individual stock on various user define time frame during anytime in the back test?
Again, not clear on what you mean by "during any time in the back test". You can do all those things by running backtests on the different market, sector, etc. and compare the end results to each other.
> 8) Does Amibroker have a trade by trade report?
Yes.
> 9) I am not a programmer, but I have come to the conclusion that my lack of programming skill has become a problem in developing, test, and deployment of my trading systems . What Book would you recommend to learn C and C++.
You will have a hard time with any backtester product without programming skills. AmiBroker uses its own language called Amibroker Formula Language (AFL). You will not need C or C++ in AmiBroker. In rare cases you might want to write your own windows Dynamic Link Library (.DLL) in C or C++ to plugin to AmiBroker in order to extend its behavior. But, otherwise you would generally do the bulk of your coding in AFL with possibly some JScript or VBScript if you find the need.
The two books published on AFL are published by a member of this forum and can be found here:
http://blueowlpress.com/
"Quantitative Trading Systems" is the more advanced of the two and will be the more useful for anyone looking to write code.
Mike
>
> Thank You
> ACE
>
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