Data Collection for Strategy Forward/Back Testing.

With the historical data and the support and resistance known, can i can calculate the distance price retraces back to support or resistance before going up or down? This way I can say "after +500 trades, prices retraces back to support or resistance by X ticks the most"? This way I have idea the optimal place to use limit orders for entry.

Yes, for backtesting purposes. You would just be doing addition/subtraction between the "current" price and the support/resistance price...this would be your "distance."
 
Actually, a good starting point could be to use free, historical data, and build an excel sheet system that uses two SMA crossovers to generate signals. This sheet should also track a balance. You can initially make the SMA periods manually determined; then let solver find them.

It will give you experience that will carry over to your more complex intraday system.
 
Thank you userque,

I will give this some thought and planning and proceed.

This is my first time building/planning a trading algorithm to back test using a software.
 
Actually, a good starting point could be to use free, historical data, and build an excel sheet system that uses two SMA crossovers to generate signals. This sheet should also track a balance. You can initially make the SMA periods manually determined; then let solver find them.

It will give you experience that will carry over to your more complex intraday system.

Thank you userque for help,

Good information and good starting place. I agree with you, I just need practice building a strategy in Excel just to get my brain to thinking and build from a simple intraday Excel trading system and like you mention using free historical data. Afterwards, I can expand the Excel programming to my own system while I discretionary (forward testing) trade it with paper money. This will allow to write the strategy on paper in logic planning.

Do you have any resources or books on Excel programming dedicated to trading algorithms strategies?

Thanks
 
just to get my brain to thinking

Exactly! You should "grow" into it, imo.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any Excel backtesting resources. I did a search (excel backtesting) on Google and looked at the first 100 results...nothing I feel comfortable recommending, and some I feel would be 'harmful' at this point in your learning (trying to use Pivot Tables, for example).

But maybe you could find some of the links useful.
 
Some python scripts on GitHub can do that (for IQFeed). Sorry, do not have direct link right now, but I'm sure it will be quite easy to find it.

Here is I've got via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1813979/1813979-6210213460379262978

Here is what I've used for Yahoo finance - https://github.com/cgoldberg/ystockquote
Quandl - also interesting service. And btw - has Excel plugin https://www.quandl.com/tools/excel - not used, will be happy to get any feedbacks
Market data downloader (from article above) - http://stocksharp.com/products/hydra/ - the same, not used

Also Excel (below of 2010 version) has an feature with auto-refresh imported HTML. Can be used with Yahoo.
 
Thank you
Exactly! You should "grow" into it, imo.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any Excel backtesting resources. I did a search (excel backtesting) on Google and looked at the first 100 results...nothing I feel comfortable recommending, and some I feel would be 'harmful' at this point in your learning (trying to use Pivot Tables, for example).

But maybe you could find some of the links useful.
Thank you so much userque,

I am looking into options of Excel and other platforms.
 
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