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AW: Replacement for 2000i



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Hey Guys,

you keep me busy. I can not write as fast as you all respond :) Gary is
one who did look at WLD2 and I spend a few hours (or was it days :))
with him. I respect him as some one who knows TS and is trying to get to
know WLD2. 

Gary, I have a few replies for you here:



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Gary Fritz [mailto:fritz@xxxxxxxx] 
Gesendet: Montag, 18. November 2002 07:04
An: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: Re: Replacement for 2000i

Leslie Walko wrote:
> I agree with Pierre.  Could not have said it better myself.
> I happen to own Wealth Lab.  

I wouldn't go quite as far as Pierre did, but I do agree with a 
number of his points.

I also own Wealth Lab.  I find it useful for testing systems on 
baskets of commodities, something that TS provides almost no 
support for.  I pieced together a hack solution in TS based on 
dumping information to files, reading it into Excel, combining 
equity curves, etc etc.  But that's extremely slow and painful, 
and it's very difficult to implement proper money management 
techniques.

[VK>>] 
That is a good start. Of course it is difficult to change a software
after all this years. 


Other than that, I have to say I prefer TS in almost every 
respect.  Take that with a grain of salt, as I haven't spent very 
much time with WL and I'm definitely no expert on it, but a 
number of things about WL really bug me.  A few examples:

* The interface model is, in my opinion, poorly designed.  There 
are totally separate interfaces (with similar but different UI's, 
different ways of determining defaults, different reporting 
outputs) for testing a single market vs. testing multiple markets 
with MM (position sizing).  

[VK>>] 
Well, at least WL has the ability to do test multiple markets. TS does
not have to care about a problem like that. 

 
* Because of this separated design, you can e.g. optimize a 
system on a single market, but you CANNOT optimize it on a basket 
with MM.

[VK>>] 
You can optimize it on a basket using simple money management like the
one that TS is using, correct? You are just not able to optimize 100
markets with a system and a particular MM rule. In any case I think that
this would not give you a real result. As far as I know there are some
plans to include that in a future version, you might even know better?


* WL stores default input values and optimization ranges in the 
source, in a rather kludgy comment form.  There is NO WAY to 
specify a particular value for a specific instance, the way TS 
lets you apply a system to two different charts with different 
inputs.  The only way to simultaneously basket-test a system with 
two different sets of inputs is to save two different source 
versions.

[VK>>] 
I am not sure if I understand correctly. But lets say you optimize a
system on 1000 symbols and you wish to apply the optimum value of each
symbol to each individual stock you just do a right mouse click and pick
the appropriate command. Next time you open up that symbol with this
system it will have the values assigned from the optimization. Did you
talk about that feature?


* WL was originally designed as a stock-trading platform.  
Support for futures was tacked on later, and it's not pretty.  
The platform has no concept of whether a particular symbol is a 
stock, future, index, etc.  You have to switch the ENTIRE 
PLATFORM from "Stock Mode" to "Futures Mode," which will then 
cause it to look up the symbol root in a Futures Symbol Manager 
list for the BPV, margin, etc.  If you trade only stocks or only 
futures then it's not too bad, but it gets a bit messy if you 
want to do both.


[VK>>] 
When I back test stocks and futures in a basket I just make sure that
the symbols have different names like C and C. If the symbols don’t
match then WLD2 will take symbols that are in the Futures-Symbol-Manager
as futures and anything else as stocks.

 * WL has very poor support for keyboard shortcuts.  For those of 
us with tendonitis in the mouse fingers, using WL for any 
significant period of time is quite literally a pain.

[VK>>] 
I guess you win here, I never use them so I can not comment.

Not sure whether I like to hear more or whether we should first settle
the issues above? :)


Volker