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Re: RANKINGS was Is it time to find a BETTER toolbox?



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> What I am saying here is that if I had the balls to
> translate my Easylanguage routines that my first pick
> would be Metastock.

I've looked into this, and several friends of mine have been using 
Metastock for quite a while.  It has nice charting features but its 
language is really crude and limited.  Several of my local Metastock 
friends have ended up buying TS4 or TS2k so they could experiment 
with things they just can't express (or can't express without extreme 
pain) in Metastock.  

So I wouldn't put that at #1 unless you plan to do all your work in 
DLL's, and I strongly suspect you will be limited with what you can 
do then.  (Because the DLL's won't be hooked into the guts of the 
Metastock engine the way the MS language is.)

On the other hand, several people have written plug-in additions for 
MS to do things like portfolio testing, and I think you drive those 
with DLL code.  So maybe with add-ins like that, MS could be a 
reasonable alternative.  Maybe.

> #2  Neoticker (never used, just based upon your words)

This one looks promising, and Lawrence seems very willing to work 
with users to improve it.  They've just released the realtime 
version.  You can use VBscript, Javascript, or Delphiscript, so the 
language should be no problem as long as they've thought out the data 
model & libraries properly.  The portfolio testing capabilities seem 
very limited, though.  As far as I can tell, you can run a system on 
a basket of symbols, but I don't see any decent portfolio reports and 
statistics, or portfolio optimization features.  That might be there 
and I just didn't see it.

> #4  http://www.Ravenquote.com

This has no backtesting capabilities, does it?  I think it's just a 
feature-rich charting app with scanning capabilities.

> #4  http://www.cqg.com

Could be useful, but the programming language is very cryptic and 
somewhat limited.  And you're tied into one data vendor, excellent 
though CQG may be.

> #5  Tradestation 2000i

No thanks.

> #6  http://www.linnsoft.com

Can't tell for sure, but the language looks pretty primitive.  No 
portfolio capabilities.

> #7  http://www.lmt-expo.com

This appears to be based on Unix, except the student/academic 
version.  No indication of cost.  Looks like it has a lot of powerful 
math support, but I think the programming language may be basic Excel-
like functions.  Hard to tell what the feature set is.


Someone recently pointed me to http://www.wealth-lab.com.  This is an 
interesting "trading community" site that supports an online system 
testing facility.  Some people have been nervous about the site, not 
wanting to submit their system code to a website.  But it turns out 
there is also a stand-alone "desktop" version, and they are actively 
working to improve it.  Currently stocks only, but futures are 
coming.  They say by the end of the year they'll have portfolio-
testing capabilities to match anything Trading Recipes can offer, 
which is saying a LOT.  Not bad for $300, and there is a free 
downloadable demo.  I haven't tried it yet.

http://www.amibroker.com/ has a lot of fans, but so far it's only 
EOD, and I think stocks only.  Realtime is scheduled for the end of 
the year.  Portfolio testing is supposed to be possible.  No examples 
of the language but it's supposed to be extensible with 
VBscript/Jscript.  Only $69.

Gary