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At 12:48 PM 1/17/2005, Volker Knapp wrote:
>You say:
>" Creating an application like TradeStation would require tens of man-years
>of effort so it is unlikely that TradersStudio is even 5% of TradeStation."
>
>I am sure you have seen my occasional postings here :). I could not care
>less what people have to say but it still hurts if there is a lack of
>acknowledgement that Wealth-Lab actually is a software that offers 90% of
>what TS has and many features that TS does not have; features that I find
>most important like portfolio backtesting.
I don't recall saying anything about Wealth-Lab :-)
While I have never used it, I understand that it does a lot of what TradeStation does and that a lot of people use it productively.
I would be interested in your estimate of how many man-years of effort it has taken to get Wealth-Lab to its present state. I am sure it was not a minor effort.
>You say:
>" The idea of products like TradeStation was to allow you to create and
>backtest your trading ideas before trying them with real money. If you think
>you can do this without learning some programming you are fooling yourself."
>
>I agree you need programming skill to accomplish complex systems but for
>beginners the drag and drop system creation should be appealing (WL has it).
>So here again TS is actually limited in testing ideas.
I personally don't think you can create a system that works well by simply pasting a few pre-canned signals into a system but I could be wrong. It is a good way to get new users motivated to actually learn some programming, though.
And TS8 has dozens pre-canned signals that you can insert into a chart for long-entry, short entry, and all kinds of stops that you can paste together to form a system as well but I suspect your mechanism is easier to use.
>How do you loop thru a list of symbols in TS?
It is easy. I put all the symbols into RadarScreen then link a chart to RadarScreen. Then, beginning at the top of the RadarScreen list, hit the "Enter" key over and over. (I use MacroExpress to automatically press the "Enter key any number of times I specify.) This steps down the list, loading each new symbol into the chart. I use a FileAppend statement in the code to write the data for each symbol into a file. I can then do summaries using the file in Excel.
Alternately, I can write the data for each symbol into global variables, sum up values, and plot the resulting summaries in a separate chart. (TS8 has a free global variables add-in you can use.)
>How do you test the following simple system:
>
>Buy the five stocks out of a portfolio of 500 stocks, that dropped the
>highest percentage below their 200 SMA. Of course you only want to buy these
>stocks and if another stock dropped by a higher margin then exit the stock
>that is closest to the 200 SMA and buy the one that fulfilled the criteria.
It is easy to do it for any day with RadarScreen. Create an indicator for RadarScreen that calculates the percent below the 200 day moving average:
Input[Offset]
Pct = 100 * (Average(Close, 200) - Close) / Close;
Plot1(Pct[Offset], "1")
Apply it to the 500 stocks in RadarScreen. This will calculate the value for each of the stocks and display it in a column.
Now double-click on the column to sort the list by that value. I just did it for the S&P 500 list and got the attached picture. The five stocks you want to buy tomorrow are at the top of the list. (UIS, MRK, MMC, PFE, PMCS). It took less than five minutes and three lines of code.
Each day you double-click on the column again to see the stocks for that day.
There are several ways to automate this to run through a range of days using MacroExpress but it takes a little programming. :-)
Bob Fulks
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