Its clearly impossible - the granularity of data required (each individual order tracked separately) is not provided.Quote from toe:
I am a Quant Developer user, it does allow you to record quote and depth data from your data provider. However my guess is that trying keep a track of where your order is in the queue this way would be near impossible.
Quote from Nana Trader:
Neither Tradestation nor any other software can do
this.
The only way to get a clear pic, you have to have the
right data for it. Your need to have data quotes, not
just traded price data.
It will be a large data base, so No charting plateform
offers it. You can buy from internet, it can get very
expensive unless you are buying on groups.
I don't think just adding slippage will correctly simulate a limit-based system. For example, assume the system places a buy limit order at ES 1200 and the bid gets to 1200, some trades occur @ 1200 but it does not trade down to 1199.75. Now how does the backtesting system handle this?Quote from ssternlight:
Just a thought, but why not just add a tick slippage on each end. If your system doesn't have a positive expectancy at that point it is unlikely that you will have much success with live trading. I can't believe there is much of an edge in trying to muscle the queue -- and having said that there are plenty of systems out there that try to do just that by placing orders at different price levels in advance and pulling them if the trend appears to be against the entry.
Quote from winter:
I don't think just adding slippage will correctly simulate a limit-based system. For example, assume the system places a buy limit order at ES 1200 and the bid gets to 1200, some trades occur @ 1200 but it does not trade down to 1199.75. Now how does the backtesting system handle this?
You can't just assume that you were filled at 1200.25 since that is nonsensical. If the system uses limit orders then some orders will be filled and others wont (and as someone else pointed out earlier, losing trades will always be filled, e.g. if the price slides to your stop then you definitely got filled). Assuming every order is filled and adding .25 of slippage will give different (faulty) results (because you may not have gotten filled at all).
Ahhh, understood. I was thinking of slippage in terms of market orders - what you said makes sense. Thanks.Quote from ssternlight:
It works the other way.
If you have a limit order at 1200 and a slippage setting of 1 tick then the price needs to get to 1199.75 on the signal bar before the backtest will give you a fill -- at 1200. It's not perfect as there are times when you get bad quotes or trades outside the bid ask that still couldn't be filled but it will increase the accuracy of the system remarkably when compared to real trading...