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Dear Coach, Tech Support, Formulas and/or other MetaStock colleagues and
users,
I own MetaStock Professional and today,
Monday, 12/17/01, is the last day of
my 30 day evaluation period, so I would
appreciate a reply within a few hours
if possible.
I wish to use your tool to trade emini
S&P500 stock index futures contracts.
I have used the System Tester/compare feature
to identify 6 Equis and PS trading systems
which appear to have been very profitable
trading the December contract, 5 minutes bars,
from 9/17 to 12/12.
However, there are a few changes I need to
make to all the systems in order to make
the trading "context" realistic for me,
and probably many other, futures traders:
1) I cannot hold positions overnight, thus
only wish to enter the market after opening,
9:30 AM, 10AM actually being the preferred time,
and be sure to exit it by close, 4:15PM, 4:00 PM
being my preferred time. I understand from
two of your tech support guys that this "market hours only"
trading parameter requires modification to
the system formulas, i.e. there is not an easy
pull down menu feature which allows the user
to throw time boundary switches.
What would the modification
be? How complex is it going to be to alter all
the pre-built trading systems so that I can
do System Tester/compare analysis under this constraint?
Are you going to charge me for this modification?
How much? When can you get it to me?
2) I do not expect or require to always be in
the market. Most systems I have seen are not meant
to keep one in the market no matter how sideways
the action is. It appears to me that the System
Tester set up an "always in" parameter when it
did the compare analysis. Is this necessary?
Or can I have each system run under the framework
of its best results, i.e. entering/exiting/waiting
out the market so as to make the most money, or
do all the systems need to be "always in" in
order to do a comparison?
3) I do not yet know how to use, but understand
that it is fairly straight forward, i.e. doesn't
require custom formulas, to program in stop
losses in the system for backtesting?
Is this true?
How hard would it be to program in an automatic
trailing stop loss?
4) I understand from the manual and onscreen
help that users who trade futures contracts
are encouraged to do points only tests
because of the challenge of accounting for
margin leverage in the futures contracts.
Does this mean that it is impossible
to do realistic, hard dollar backtesting
of futures contract, accounting for
commissions and margin, or that it is
just very difficult to create custom
formulas to do the calculations?
Thank you very much.
Marshall Shoemaker
marshall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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