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Nicola,
you should have included BITM (www.tarnsoft.com) in your review. IMHO, it is
a far superior product. You can download and test it for free. (Disclaimer:
no connections etc.)
Regards,
Michael Suesserott
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Nicola Prada [mailto:nicola.prada@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Gesendet: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 18:05
An: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: MY TRADING RECIPES REVIEW
MY TRADING RECIPES REVIEW
After my post on the Chuck’s le Beau Trader Forum I received several emails
from people interested in my first impressions using a software called
“Trading Recipes”. I like to post my experience here on the list.
A week ago I received my copy of Trading Recipes (TR). I used at the office
Tradestation for several years (since it was in version 3.0) and I tried
Add-ons for it in order to implement portfolio analysis and money management
studies.
I can say for a *non daytrader / researcher* point of view TR is a more
powerful and less expensive (dollars and time) sw compared to others.
--------------------------------
DISCLAIMER
I am an Italian technical analyst and I develop systems for private and
institutional customers. My language is not English so I apologize for
possible grammar mistake.
I have no affiliation with Trading Recipes or with its vendor, Bob Spear. I’
m only a satisfied customer and I DO NOT authorize anyone to copy this
message, in whole or in part, for advertising purposes.
This is *my* personal opinion originated from my need to choose the right
software for me.
-------------------------------
I compared TR (v 4) functionalities to the ones available in others
commercially available software:
******* What I like:
1) TR is able to backtest in a SINGLE step a diversified portfolio of
securities (stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities....). Tradestation
,Metastock and others are only able to test 1 tradable at time. For me
interested in Stock market it's the only available sw that lets me test a
REAL stock portfolio.
2) TR has a function called "Simultest" that let you test different systems
over a diversified portfolio at the same time! You can have a trend follower
system for the currencies and a countertrend system for the equity indices
that trade your account.
3) At the same time TR implements *FULLY* programmable Money management
strategies for betsizing & risk control. You have not to be dependent of a
pre-programmed money management strategy. You can setup also different risk
level for different groups or sectors.
4) TR can do a "Worst case scenario analysis" : It automatically selects
each trade in sequence making it the very first trade entered and it save
results from each run in an ASCII text file. You can know how your system
performed when run for a lot of different start points.
5) I think the Trading Basic language is simple and can be directly compared
to Tradestation's Easy Language.
Principal differences are:
* you view your variables in a spreadsheet (and you use it as your debugger)
* the resource /entry /exit are coded in different statement/pages.
* bar reference:
suppose you want to code a system that buy the open if the previous close is
> than x
In TS: if C > x then Buy Next Bar at market;
in TR: if C[1] > x then Buy Open
If you have fear to write code TR is not for you. If you are a power user of
Tradestation you will have no problem in learning the Trading Basic
language.
6) TR allow the user to access external data items available for each
market, each day, and this allow the backtesting of cot, spread ,arbitrage
strategies or to implement the minimum lot test (useful to test a real
italian stocks portfolio).
7) With Trading Recipes one can introduce postdictive errors and this lets
the user to test things like “Maximum Slippage Test” as pointed out by Mark
Johnson in a previous post.
This is impossible to do in Tradestation4 and 2000i without the need to use
an external .DLL.
8) TR has not showme, indicators, paintbars, functions as Tradestation but
it has only “Systems”. This means if you want a show me you have to do a
computation in TR and after say plot this as an histogram. This is a good
work around. But there is to remember that TR is born as a backtest tool not
as a chart software for discretionary traders.
9) Only with TR I was able to see the power of betsizing and to see an
equity curve go exponential also with a simple channel breakout + *dynamic*
betsize provided with the software. I think I’ll focus more on the betsizing
side and less on the entries / exit setups from now.
10) Last but not least the support provided from Bob Spear. He helped me
with his sw and with minor Windows trouble (not directly related to TR). I
never had before a support of this quality for a sw.
****** What I do NOT like:
a) TR is a DOS sw (for now) and it is limited in graph resolutions by the
MSDOS limits.
As Bob Spear pointed out I admit this is true but does not influence trading
results.
b) There is not (for now) an optimizer but there is a “batch function”. I
think optimization is dangerous but I like to see the graphs of the
distribution of the results based on different parameters in order to
evaluate the robustness of the systems. A TR “batch run “– export to
ascii – import to excel can solve this.
****** Why I bought Trading Recipes , I like it and I am so happy:
I was looking for a sw able to implement portfolio simulation and *Dynamic*
money management (betsizing) studies.
The only alternative I found was:
Option 1:
Tradestation 2000 : (2,399 usd) +
Rina Portfolio Evaluator 2000 (995 usd) +
Rina Money Manager 2000 (1,995 usd) =
Total= 5,389 u.s.d.
And
Option2: Trading Recipes (2,295 usd)
I excluded Athena software from Tharp because it is a lot overpriced.
I excluded another’s 2000 usd sw because it is not completed yet (now it’s
in the 1.0 release).
*First* I compared 5,389 usd to the 2,295 usd asked for Trading Recipes.
After I compared the functionalities of these 2 different options:
* I do not need real time capabilities provided by Tradestation because I
focus myself on position trading and asset allocation studies.
* Trading Recipes lets me test my entire portfolio all at once, Rina
requires that I individually test every market in my portfolio in
Tradestation first and then export them to a file and them pull them back
into the Rina program. This approach doesn’t work for me because I value my
time. A test that would take 2-3 minutes in Recipes could take several hours
with Rina software.
* Trading Recipes lets me apply a real DYNAMIC position sizing and
recalculates it every day based on the real equity.
* Trading Recipes is a complete backtesting and trading software, it is not
an add-on to another software.
For these reasons I bought Trading Recipes and I am a lot satisfied. I think
it is a great backtesting and trading tool.
Nicola Prada
nicola.prada@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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