steve
i am using excel for single market patterns. i tried several times to get the correlation search going, but it never paid off. instead i have build a little backtesting sheet and immediately test new features. i found this to be quicker than correlation analysis, most probably because i never made it get me somewhere. t-test serves as a co-check for avoiding overfit. in correlation analysis i found that many things beat random, but nothig significantly (i saw one exception to this - but i found that using the direct backtesting approach)
excel's biggst advantage is that it takes so little time to implement things. i find it great. though we do all things finally in c++ and have a look at tradestation, i like the easyToGo aspect of excel.
how many new things do you typically find per quarter?
peace