System Results

[Timothy Morge <tmorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Morning, folks...

Alright...in the quiet afternoon, I waded through a few of those odd posts I
kept over the past six or seven months, playing with the code and lo and behold,
I found one or two that had something that looked like positive results. None of
them are gonna make me the hottest systems vendor at Omega World, but they had
enough positive results to make me scartch my head and go, 'Hmmmmmmm....'

So, I looked at their trades for SP8U and then at SP8M and then SP7Z and they
still had some merits. And looking at their results closely, I noticed they
sometimes had a bad trade--a trade that was a larger loser than their normal
losing trade. So I opened up the system format box and looked and they of course
were set for no stops, no trailing stops...well, you get the picture. And then I
saw the optomization button. Uh oh...And I remembered that that was a naughty
word. AND the dreaded Omega bouncing stop loss tick whatchamacallit...So, here's
my question:

Now I have a little system I want to play with. I want to know if setting some
stops and trailing stops and all those neat system testing things mean a thing
if I test it in TradeStation. And if they do, what should I test and optomize,
and what do I look out for? Last, if I am looking at a system that uses tick
data for the S&P, how much data should I test it on and where can I get
something other than just the tick contract data I have in my server [something
like a big chunk of continuous S&P tick data maybe?]??

Thanks for all the help!

Tim Morge