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I am a private investor. I have no affiliation with AB - other than
I'm a registered owner of the software. I have nothing for sale.
I switched 100% to AmiBroker in Mar '05, although I still attend the
local MS users group meetings here in San Diego. I have MS 9.0 EOD
along with DownLoader 8.0 (that's right - no typo). I run AB 4.70.
The thing that got me switch was that when I upgraded from MS v8 to v9
- MS totally broke because I could no longer download data from
eSignal. At the MS roadshow where I bought the upgrade, there was no
mention that they had dropped eSignal - curiously, they still use eSig
RT data. This REALLY pissed me off, since I trade for a living - it
took me a couple of weeks of beating on MS to get them to make things
work again - my DL v8 is a "factory special".
Now to your question:
The backtester for AB has 3 levels of usage. The top (simplest) level
is all that I have used. These are the things that I like about the
AB backtester:
* It is a true PORTFOLIO backtester, MS is single stocks. Don't
be fooled here, MS uses the word "portfolio" when talking about their
backtester, but they actually mean multiple purchases of a single stock.
* there are 2 default report modes, one showing the performance
of each stock and the second the performance of the portfolio
* There are 35 metrics returned in the default report - all in a
format so you can readily import them into Excel.
* to me, two of the most important portfolio metrics are:
Compound Annual Return ($ earned / total $ invested or not)
Risk Adjusted Return ($ earned / $ invested)
>>> I think this is a huge problem with MS's backtester, hey, you made
a million, but I won't tell you how much you invested to earn it!
* There is a equity graph, like MS. HOWEVER there is a daily
plot of $$ invested, $$ in cash, $$ drawdown. This allows you to see
how your portfolio is performing day-by-day.
>>> My ETF trading system uses a Ranking Value. If no ETF's have a
high enough rank (like right now), the system is in cash. Knowing the
daily value of portfolio cash was essential to optimizing this system.
YTD performance is +14%
* The optimizer has an animated 3-d graph of performance versus
optimization values. In one opitmization run, you can see the
optimization graph for each of the 35 parameters - not just equity vs
opt value.
In summary, I think the AB backtester answers the real-world questions
that every trader wants to know "What will be the returns on my
investments?" What are the risks - drawdowns?. They are all part of
Standard AB. To get this type of information in MS, you would need to
buy SimScript (I think) a > $1000 add-on.
--- In equismetastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "metastkuser"
<andysmith_999@xxxx> wrote:
> Would anyone offer a comparison of Metastock-TradeSim combination
> versus Amibroker in the area of backtesting?
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