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Steve Research wrote:
>
> I use 3 different software: Tradestation 2000i, Behold! and the old but
> still good Trading Recipes.
>
> Behold! is a Macintosh program but you can also run it on Windows and Linux
> os. It is a great software that allows portfolio backtesting , optimizing
> and dynamic money management. It's language driven and it has more and
> powerful features than Trading Recipes (optimizer, 100+ indicators, custom
> functions). Only 800$ and free update police.
[...]
It's great to hear from someone who can offer a first-hand experience
with all those programs. I'm interested in portfolio software myself. In
my opinion, the largest value of an investment I make in software is not
in the price I pay to purchase it, but the time I invest to learn it,
before I can find out if I can use it. So, I want to look in "case
studies" or "success stories" of traders with similar goals as mine.
I've been following some discussions on Behold in forums, incl. Chuck
LeBeau's TraderClub http://www.traderclub.com/discus/ .
He wrote in Omega-list:
"It [Behold] was originally intended to be the MAC version of
TradeStation. Omega abandoned the project and the developer finished it
on his own and now offers it to MAC users. It is better and faster than
TS 4.0 and it will test more than one market at a time. It uses a very
slightly different version of EasyLanguage but mostly the same. Dave
Lucas and I used it for most of our research and we love it." -- Chuck
LeBeau, 25-Feb-1999
So I'll take the case of Chuck LeBeau himself, a long-time user and
advocate of Behold. He has been in the futures industry for over 30
years and offers a multitude of services (
http://traderclub.com/services.htm ) including development and sale of
systems, does seminars with Van Tharp, has written a book on futures
trading with technical analysis etc.
Yet, you can check his systems results as posted at
http://traderclub.com/files/results/TraderclubResults.zip (19 systems,
trading several different commodity markets, period Feb-2000 to
May-2001, Starting Equity $100K, Ending Equity $63K). The way the
combined portfolio stats were produced, it is clear that it's NOT
"portfolio trading" in the TradingRecipes way (ie trading many markets
and systems in dynamic interaction).
I don't mean to criticize LeBeau, but I can only wonder what's going
on... Hasn't he coded those very systems he's selling under Behold,
which he's using himself ? If so, why doesn't he produce the SIMULTESTed
equity curves from it ? If Behold does portfolios, what's the problem of
packaging Behold + his system + Mac hw, it'd still be under $3000 that
most other vendor systems cost!
And btw there are several more concerns about the accuracy of backtested
results provided there.
And ofcourse, there is quite a bit more in trading portfolios: ability
to handle non-USD denominated markets out of the same account, custom
tick-based slippage (e.g. 4-ticks in one market and 1-tick in another),
accurate accounting of the impact of rollover comm+slippage which is
needed to do correct simulations for longer-term systems. You can't do
any of this with TS... Can you do this with Behold ?
Could you post some results of a simple channel-breakout system, traded
over a 15-market portfolio, with dynamic money-management, using Behold
? What I have in mind is what Mark Johnson did at
http://traderclub.com/discus/messages/18/348.html#POST1220
Regards, M
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