[sevensa]

Originally Posted by DaveDM »

TS from my experience seems to be terrible at backtesting. Only forward testing seems to provide a true picture of a system's performance, however, it's very time consuming and then when changes are needed, you have to forward test again. It's like constantly trying to hit a moving target travelling at the speed of light.

DaveDM

I am using TS 2000i and thought its backtesting is decent, but have not used any of the newer versions of TS. Why do you say it is terrible? Is it calculate results incorrectly, lacking features, or what? Can you provide a bit more detail what you find terrible about it?

[Tams]

Originally Posted by DaveDM »

TS from my experience seems to be terrible at backtesting. Only forward testing seems to provide a true picture of a system's performance, however, it's very time consuming and then when changes are needed, you have to forward test again. It's like constantly trying to hit a moving target travelling at the speed of light.
DaveDM

Do you know another software that has more experience and more capabilities in backtesting than TradeStation?


LOL

[momentom]

The problem here is not which software package. The issue is peoples' expectations from automation.

Markets continually change modes between vertical and horizontal activity. Without building something into a trading system that copes with this phenomenon, expectations will not be met as the forward testing data will most certainly be different to the backtested data on which the system was tuned.

[ephi144]

ts = very slow. does not take advantage of multicore.
also if it crashes say good bye to your results. no resuming.

i had this experience recently. i tested my start for 28 hours or so over 2 months on @ES with great results (28k for the two months). then it crashed. now i cannot get back to those results.

attached is the snapshot i was able to take. I was taking snapshots whenever i could but when it crashed i was at work so don t what happend after the above snapshot.

i tried multicharts which is able to take advantage of multicore but has a memory leak issues and also crashes eventually. they are both good for short term backtesting and/or limited inputs.
.
multicharts is highly recommended if 1. you have multicore cpu, a lot of memory, short time frame and a lot of parameters.
otherwise ts is good

this is just my experience and opinion good luck..

[Tams]

MultiCharts is very power in backtesting and optimization; it utilizes all the CPU cores available to the operating system.

Here's a screen shot of the TaskManager during one of my backtests.





p.s. I have been using MultiCharts since 2006... never encountered memory leaks.

[DaveDM]

Sorry for the delay in responding...

My problem with TradeStation are severalfold, and I admit it could be limitations on my part too, but here they are, as I see them...

- TS crashes and hangs a lot.

- Lots of data disconnects.

- Minor changes in system settings ie. switches, flags etc. that you setup for the way it tests or is supposed to calculate will completely throw off the results entirely and you never know if you have your system settings set properly. I'm refering to look inside back bar testing and intrabar order generation. It's quirky.

- It's great at coding up ideas relatively quickly and easily and getting an idea visually if things look good or not, don't get me wrong. I just think that after being in the market so long and as much experience as they have, they could make a more stable platform with better explaination of how the flags/settings affect results and how to configure for more accurate results.

- They could also explain simple concepts like "if your profit/loss per trade is under x number of dollars there's a good chance that the strategy won't work out".

- Depending on how well their data is coming through as well, I've had changes in backtesting results, this was really weird and caused major problems for me when coding.

Would I stop using TS? No, every product has their drawbacks. No system is perfect. It is expensive but has many good qualities, but definitely LOTS of room for improvement still after all these years.

Hope that makes sense.

BTW I think TS is great for coding indicators and such.

DaveDM

[dedomraz]

Ninja Trader is good and free

[Blaiserboy]

Originally Posted by dedomraz »

Ninja Trader is good and free

Ninja Trader offers great support and a nice interface, however, I find that it uses a lot of resources....... the new version is supposed to reduce the use of resources.