Quote from bwolinsky:
It seems very odd that you claim to have an algo without any backtests. Seems like that may not be true, unless you have done backtests, you won't get any data that will be large enough to run your algo from IB.
You make a good point.
However, I would hesitate to start a flame war against kramer65.
First, there are a few accomplished discretionary traders who believe they can communicate their experience to a developer so that the trading strategy comes our ready without a need for backtest.
Second, a few institutional market-makers think no backtesting is necessary as long as they can manually increase bid-offer spread whenever the strategy trading solely aginst clients stops making money.
On the bottom line, kramer65 is more likely gullible than dishonest.
Quote from Yuri Maglev:
One program that works well with TWS is AmiBroker. It has huge programming capabilities. The shortest time intervals you can get with AB/TWS is 15s. To have enough data for backtesting, you can login before 4:00 pm EST for several days and you will have the data stored in AB. You can set up AB to download session data only or round the clock data. Then you can test your system in AB or send the data to a spreadsheet using "AddColumn".
No offence but this is
bullshit. Interative Brokers don't give you any "tick" data and you can download "1-minute" data for only a month or two back.
Note that IB don't provide timestamp on their market data. So, minute bars you see based on real-time data from IB will be different from historical minute bars downloaded from IB for the same time period.
AmiBroker is a great backtesting tool on its own. In fact, the last time I checked it provided the fastest backtest I had seen by an order of magnitude.
However, it is totally misleading to claim that AmiBroker can get better (or more) data from Interactive Brokers than other charting tools.
Quote from Bob111:
heh..you write the algo, you trade with IB, but you just realize that IB is not a TradeStation? 
then write another application to download historical data from IB (you are going to get what you paying for it) and then another application to backtest. meanwhile you can test whatever on IB's paper account(not demo). but depends on strategy,time frame,frequency- the difference can be huge between paper and real trading.
I guess the point of this rant is IB doesn't provide tick price history and the prices IB provides in real time are not suitable for reconstruction of 1-minute bars.
If you trade on, say, 5-minute time frame, all of this will have hardly any impact.
