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1 - Amibroker has its own language, AFL. But there are many similarities. I'm not saying this is effortless at all, ie. change to Amibroker. I keep a copy of HELP up and running whenever I'm writing code. For functions not available in Metastock, obviously this is all new code/syntax. I've wasted a lot more time trying to understand 8.0/8.01 than converting my current T/S to AFL (about 4 systems). I wasted a lot of time finding out about the 20,000 report limit which wasn't documented anywhere in 8.0. That really made me mad. As to the current quirks of the System Tester, I find Equis response totally unacceptable.
With Amibroker, you can easily contact the owner, chief programmer, and discuss. Equis, obviously insulates their top bosses from the people that use their software, otherwise they would publish their email addresses. It didn't use to be that way at Equis. The bosses at Equis have lost touch with their customer base. I'm sure they just look at market share, customer profiles, competition, etc. Obviously selling Reuters data is as important or more important than selling software.
30 days to evaluate their software, it took Equis more than 30 days just to get 8.0 and 8.01 shipped to me. They screwed up the shipping both times.
2 - I've asked for trade statistics to be reported in Percentage form or "Normalized" results. They continue to report statistics in dollars which is worthless for comparing one stock to another or for consideration of future results. Tell me this, if a system test reports the worst loss as $25,381, what does that tell you? Nothing, because until you know what was invested at the time, it tells you nothing. If I had $40,000 invested at the time, this is a disaster. If I had 2.5 million invested at the time, this is terrific results. Do you realize that a stock split affects the dollar loss calculations and test statistics, where a stock split would have no effect on percentage (normalized) calculations? Do you realize that the more successful your trading system is, the less useful the trading statistics are from Metastock? I refer you to "Trading Systems that Work", by Thomas Stridsman, or if you are more math oriented, Ralph Vinces works. Stridsman is quit critical of the software writers and their misleading backtest reports. The back tester in Amibroker does report several of the statistics in % or normalized. Further, you can adapt various trading templates that people have written to your database and trading system. The issue of backtesting goes away completely. Just click on a template, and you have alot of trading statistics, and that fast. Want different trade statistics, - just reprogram the template.
Various references in Equis documentation point out that it is important to have a smooth equity curve. I agree entirely. This is Risk and Reward, not just Reward. So "what" in the System backtester allows you to optimize a smooth equity curve? A smooth equity curve can be defined or measured several different ways. One way would be a regression slope of the equity curve along with a standard error, -all done in percentages. Another way would be the total % gain over that max equity drawdown in % over the same period. So Equis says a smooth equity curve is important, but doesn't give you the tools to optimize on such a variable or find an gem in a stack of 8000 stocks or 15000 mutual funds.
This isn't the standard report in amibroker, but you can get there very easily by exporting the amibroker test results over to Excel and dividing the total % return by the Max % System Drawdown. Now all stocks are very comparable. You will learn alot about your trading system, especially in terms of what kind of drawdowns you should be expecting in the future.
3 - Equis should be proud of their user interface. The smart chart display, click and pick, even a simple bar chart has to be programmed in Amibroker. Metastock is head and shoulders above Amibroker in terms of ease of use, graphics etc. Almost everything you see and take for granted in Metastock, will probably have to be programmed by you in Amibroker. However, once programmed, you don't have to do that again. Remember that programming is power, control and understanding of the output you get.
Here is the warning though. That masterful user interface with Metastock has nothing to do with making money with the software. Finding a trading system that you can trade, some stocks or markets that the system will generate a positive profit with reasonable risk expectation, and along with careful money management is what is needed to make money. Equis only addresses profits and nothing else (except the equity curve).
After a few years of trading in wild and crazy markets, software interface doesn't mean much to me. Managing profits and risk is everything to making money, which is why I'm trading in the first place. I think some people rather program and make cool graphs and charts, than make money. Maybe they think that the two are related, ... well they aren't.
Kevin Campbell
In a message dated 5/13/03 12:31:09 AM Central Daylight Time, hmw3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Tom:
You said:
>>In the mean time, I have converted all my trading systems and explorations to Amibroker for $200 - real time analysis and a few hours effort. Hardly the cost of a "bad fill".
So I now have an alternative to Metastock.
Like I said, I used Metastock to make a lot of money in the past, but 8.0 and 8.01 don't cut it. Several of my unanswered complaints to Equis are readily available in Amibroker.<<
I looked at Amibroker 4.2 briefly while I was evaluating Metastock 8 (EOD version). I'll admit I was turned off because, until you paid for the program, you had to create your database each time you opened the program, couldn't save any formulas, etc: in short, you had to essentially start over ever time you opened the program. It takes me a while to understand a program, and I wasn't able to do it effectively with the Amibroker sample. Metastock gave me 30 days and a fully functional program to evaluate.
Having said that, a few questions now that you have switched:
1. Will Amibroker accept your Metastock formulas for system testing and indicators, or do you have to learn a new language?
2. You said it overcomes some of the Metastock 8 shortcomings. What are these?
3. And since no program is perfect, what shortcomings does Amibroker have that Metastock did NOT have?
Harry
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