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GUYS CAN ANYONE SEND ME THE MACD HISTOGRAM FORMULA
NOT THE ONE THAT COMES WITH MS 8 THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE A BAR
CHART.
<BLOCKQUOTE
>
----- Original Message -----
<DIV
>From:
kevin243@xxxxxxx
To: <A
title=equismetastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
href="">equismetastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2003 10:27
PM
Subject: Re: [EquisMetaStock Group] v8
System Tester Issues and how to fix.
<FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2
FAMILY="SANSSERIF">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 CampbellIn a message dated 5/13/03
12:31:09 AM Central Daylight Time, hmw3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
<BLOCKQUOTE
TYPE="CITE">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?HarryTo
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