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Every TA platform has advantages and disadvantages. A lot of those
advantages and disadvantages depend on what you're trading and the
time frame.
Tradestation, Amibroker, and every other competitor to MS has it's
good points and it's weak points. MS is always on top of every survey
in the magazines and on the web so it's not all bad.
Don't get me wrong there are a lot of things about MS that need
fixing. It has a lot of bugs in it. The systems tester is mostly out
of cracker jack box and Equis pretty much ignores customer complaints,
wants and needs for band aide fixes. Reuters is driving the boat now
and they don't care about traders, they care about selling data, so
that has created some new problems.
Any experienced trader will tell you that the cost of switching is
high. The cost for a newbie to switch is low. However, the newbie
wants to know what the "best" program is. There is no "best" anything.
No best TA program, no best indicator, no best trading system.
Experienced traders understand that the program has to fit what they
are doing. The high cost of switching is only acceptable if they see a
benefit in profits greater than the cost. They know a particular
program doesn't make the money, they have to make money from the
program, so a different TA software package has to give them some kind
of edge.
Every TA program requires add-ons for one thing or another. Every
company selling a TA program has a lot of add-ons for sale including
independent products like TradeSim.
Another issue is the ability of a company to survive. It's a real pain
to switch and have your TA company go broke. This is not a high volume
business, so there have been many, many companies enter this area and
die. Equis and Tradestation have staying power. I don't know how many
of the other companies do, but it's a question you better know the
answer to before you invest a lot of money into putting together your
platform.
--- In equismetastock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Ed Hoopes" <reefbreak_sd@xxxx>
wrote:
>
> 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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