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Yeah, anyone who believes government produced statistics without out knowing how they are calculated is pretty foolish. The formulas used to calculate inflation, employment, etc have been changed over time and usually have been tweaked to make things look better than they are. -Mike

Yeah, I use back testing to figure out "what works" as well. I don't think I really know "why" it works from the backtesting, just that the particular formulas that I'm using are profitable in the past The trick is then making sure the entry and exit prices match up on the forward testing...

I've been looking at more possibilities... Couldn't I just use Limit if Touched Orders and place the Aux price at 0.01 above the limit buy price? I believe this would guarantee that I couldn't enter on a gap. -Mike

The reason is my backtesting only tests things that dont gap down & fill. I'm using stockfetcher to backtest and it just avoids those situations. I guess in theory I could try it in amibroker, but I dont think it would backtest very well. -Mike

So, if I put the GAT to be 9:40am EST and the stock opening price is way below my limit buy, then the order will be rejected, right? -Mike

The one possible solution I looked at is using Discretionary orders and having the Discretionary amount be $0.001. I'm not sure if that would work in practice.

Hello all, I have a order question that I can't figure out. I have an IB account and place a lot of orders (100+) the night before for various stocks at various limit prices. I only want to buy the stock XYZ if it declines to that price, not if it gaps below it. For example. I put in a...

I had many a order cancelled on IB because IB was unable to obtain the market opening price for me. From that, I believe that OPG does not move the market. -Mike

Same here, my strategies make most of their money from the OTC/Pinkies. The trick is filtering out the low volume/low money flow ones so you dont get "trapped" -Mike

I also vote for AMIBroker for backtesting. I started with stockfetcher.com, though. They also support backtesting and are easy to use. -Mike

I currently have a roll over ira (from my old 401k) that I put in etrade 2 years ago. I'd like to move all that money to Interactive Brokers but not incur any tax penalities. Can I Roll over a roll-over? -Mike

Good advice. I just started using IB, so maybe I'll try the ol' shorting again. -Mike

I stopped my short mechnical trading strategies simply because I couldn't get a fill sometimes on the shorts because my broker couldn't borrow the shares. So, the backtesting resulted in great performance, but when I implemented it, I missed out on a number of profitable trades due to real...

Agreed, survivor bias is more of a problem when you are dealing with trading the IBD100 or the components of QQQQ. Unless you've tracked those memberships over time, you'll run into a bias big time because you are backtesting on only the current list. Testing against a wide range of...

I hope to one day have enough money that I COULD significantly impact the market :) -Mike

I think one difference may be that my formula is more like a screener that looks for stocks that match a certain pattern and then buys based on that. This means that I need to go through 10,000 stocks on each optimization step which slows things down quite a bit. I have the feeling that...

That's funny, I commited one of those when I first got into backtesting. I accidently based the buy limit price at a support point calculated from that day's data. Needless to say, the results were too good to be true :) -Mike

Yeah, I've tried the manual way, but that takes a lot of manual time which I'd rather conserve. In fact, before AMI Broker I didn't have an optimizer so I HAD to manually optimize all my ideas. Too bad AMI doesn't have a monte carlo type optimizer. -Mike

I've started using AMI Broker recently and have been taking advantage of its neat optimization feature. Unfortunately on my old AMD XP 3000+ system, it takes a LONG time to run through some of my optimizations (DAYS!) I'm looking to upgrade to maybe a Dual core system, but heard that AMI...

This is very useful, Thanks! -Mike