[thrunner]

Originally Posted by davewolfs »

Will do. Do you know if tradestation offers any sort of API that would allow me to download historical data, say I wanted to build my own database based on my own criteria.

There is currently no market data API available in the tradestation platform. You can however, download a lot of data and export as text or CSV.
What you are looking to do is fairly simple, using daily data, and a lot of studies have been done (see Steenbarger). You can open a tradestation account with or w/o their brokerage acount. Alternatively, if you are just testing the waters, download a 30 day trial copy of Multicharts from TSSupport, which is a TS clone, and just use the free Yahoo EOD daily data.

As someone had pointed out in the other forum to your question, you can do all of these in MS Excel as well, which is what Steenbarger did with a lot of this studies.

[zdo]

davewolfs,

If you go the TS / MC route, PM me and I can give you template code for outputting 'count' statistics for various ways your test condition turns out (sans actual system backtesting). From there you could kick the stats out to .csv , etc. if needed...

zdo

[davewolfs]

Originally Posted by thrunner »

There is currently no market data API available in the tradestation platform. You can however, download a lot of data and export as text or CSV.
What you are looking to do is fairly simple, using daily data, and a lot of studies have been done (see Steenbarger). You can open a tradestation account with or w/o their brokerage acount. Alternatively, if you are just testing the waters, download a 30 day trial copy of Multicharts from TSSupport, which is a TS clone, and just use the free Yahoo EOD daily data.

As someone had pointed out in the other forum to your question, you can do all of these in MS Excel as well, which is what Steenbarger did with a lot of this studies.

I didn't realize that the data is easily available from Yahoo for the daily values and it seems like this could easily be done in excel. Thanks for the help.

How is Multicharts compared to the actual tradestation platform? Are almost all TS Studies/Indicators backward compatible?

[waveslider]

if you are skilled enough - you can do anything with excel. Excel can read data files in CSV format.
There are free programs (or under $100) to download free daily data from the internet too!

TS you can do a lot with, but there are better ones. I second sevensa's neoticker recommendation, and amibroker.

I am using tradersstudio which makes amibroker look like a kids toy.

[waveslider]

ok you beat me
or did you read my mind?

[BlowFish]

Originally Posted by davewolfs »

I didn't realize that the data is easily available from Yahoo for the daily values and it seems like this could easily be done in excel. Thanks for the help.

How is Multicharts compared to the actual tradestation platform? Are almost all TS Studies/Indicators backward compatible?

Pretty darn compatible.