[mnkc]

Hi I am not a trader and wanted to know about some good software in the market that help me to test trading strategies for academic purposes. I heard about tradestation 2000i. Any opinion? Does this software come with the historical data free? or do I need to pay for it? Ideally I am looking for inexpensive ones. I appreciate your input.

[torero]

Hi mnkc, TS is good but 99$ a month might be not what you want if it's too expensive. It comes with all the historical data you need (as long as the existance of the stock), including tick (1 yr max). As for the other, there is MetaTrader that is provided by many forex brokers to demo for free, but it's only for forex pairs. I learned plenty from this site: forexfatory.com

I think there is Wealth-Lab Technical Analysis, Charting and Trading Systems, I believe it's free but not sure about the historical data. I heard it's pretty good.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

[mnkc]

Thank you for the reply. After some research I decided to use tradestation 2000i purely for the purpose of backtesting few of my trading strategies, hence I do not wish to subscribe to any live data feed providers.

I am planning to purchase historical data from any reliable source and then import into tradestation. However most of the data vendors seems to have their data in text format. Is there any method to convert the data? and how to import that data into tradestation?

Can any one of you guide me through the right process that would enable me to achieve my goal?

Thanks

[torero]

From what I understand the process is quite tedious to import from 3rd party vendors. You might want to check out the TS Forum, plenty of threads on this subject.