Deciding on a Backtesting and Trading Platform

[Tim Arnold]

I had read somewhere at the ET forums that Curtis Faith is no longer working with Trading Blox.

Curtis has not been involved in any consistent way with Trading Blox for over three years. He finally sold his remaining interest in the product about a year ago in order to pursue other interests.

http://www.tradingblox.com/tradingblox/about.htm

 

[JaiSreeram]

Quote from Murray Ruggiero:
Yes, There a good section on it in Robert Pardo new book book.
The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Systems (Second Addition)
In addition I have written several articles in Futures on the topic over the years. One I remember was April and June 2005.

Quote from TraderSystem:
Just to help you out, following are links to the book (Robert):
a) http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Robert Pardo&page=1
b) http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470128011.html
c) http://www.ecampus.com/book/9780470128015

To search for Murray articles, go to http://www.allbusiness.com/ site and type either his name (Ruggiero, Murray) or the topic you wish (e.g. walk forward).

I found the above articles really interesting. Can TradersStudio do all that what is mentioned in the above articles?

 

[av68]

Purchased Traders Studio about two weeks ago, the accompanying manuals are poor and not up to date with the software.
Customer service has been slow to answer questions and is not responsive to problems.
So far I am very dissapointed in this system.

 

[av68]

TS staff has responded to all of the issues that I have approached them with, some I had already figured out on my own.

 

[fundjunkie]

Quote from av68:

TS staff has responded to all of the issues that I have approached them with, some I had already figured out on my own.

I would encourage you to stick with TS regardless (to a point) of beefs you might have with support on any given day. Were it a vanilla, run of the mill product then, yes, classify the product & company based on responsiveness of a support guy.

But given the relative merit of the product I'd encourage you to hold tight and do what you seem to be doing already - learn by trial and error. Given the sophistication of what can be done with TS I wouldn't be surprised if many of their support people struggle to grasp what many people may be asking them anyway.

 

[syswizard]

Quote from jconrad1:

What is NinjaTrader missing?

Ninja is missing historical data loading and robust backtesting. They call their current backtesting mode "replay".
It's really not quite even up to Tradestation's TS2000i's standards in that regard and that software is 8 years old.
Don't get me wrong, Ninja has great potential...the support is excellent and they listen to their users.
I think Ninja Version 7 is going to be setting a new standard for excellence in a comprehensive trading and testing platform.

 

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Quote from syswizard:

Ninja is missing historical data loading and robust backtesting. They call their current backtesting mode "replay".

Thanks for the vote of confidence with our upcoming NT7. To ensure that our current capabilities are accurately represented I offer the following.

We have -

- "Market Replay" which is a true level I and level II replay tick by tick that can be used to replay recorded markets at a later date up to 300x actual speed. Automated strategies can be run in this environment. Think of it like a real-time backtest.

- I am not sure what the definition of historical data loading and robust backteting means but we DO HAVE the ability to load historical bar data and backtest single and multi-series strategies on tick, minute and daily base bar compressions.

 

[Gyles]

At times, I feel that it is real nice to have someone involved in the development of a platform (like Murray of TradersStudio) to ask questions on a forum like Elite Trader.

It is very important to have a main developer or programmer to be a trader and involved in the development and ongoing improvement of a trading platform. It gives a personal touch and makes all the difference; as the lack of this is why most of the platforms seem to miss the mark to address the issues of real traders.

Please see the following post:

What do you think of TradersStudio?

 

[Murray Ruggiero]

Quote from JaiSreeram:

I found the above articles really interesting. Can TradersStudio do all that what is mentioned in the above articles?

Yes TradersStudio has a very powerful walk forward testing engine built into the product.

 

[NUTSNEAL]

NinjaTrader Ray

I want to say it really pisses me off that my post about Ninja Trader was deleted just because it was not favorable toward Ninja Trader. Ninja has the worst tech support I have ever encontered. I would not wish your software on my worst enemy!!!!

NUTSNEAL