getting serious: wealth-lab vs amibroker

I can give you some SW selection guidelines that I find are very important in a long run:

o) Make a long term decision. Look not only for the features that you need today. The flexibility of the SW is very important because switching to a new tool is not only time-consuming but also psychologically uncomfortable. And flexibility means that the tool provides you with a common functions. The language must be powerful enough to implement any trading system.

o) Don't try to get SW that is perfect in real-time trading and for end of day data. It doesn't exist (TS is not good as EOD backtesting tool). Unfortunately it's necessary to accept that for EOD and real-time needs different tools must be used

o) The SW must be able to generate backtested equity curve and basic trading statistics from multiple trading systems on multiple markets

o) The SW must be powerful enough in the area of position sizing, e.g. it must be able to implement position sizing based on time varying risk of a total portfolio

o) Don't underestimate built in access to quality data sources. May be connection to Bloomberg terminal is too expensive at the moment, but if you are successful, you will come to it
 
Quote from diligent:

anyone else? do this few people actually backtest?

thanks again for any and all responses...
More...

Hi Dilligent,

I have used all of the programs above,and they are all excellent programs,but I ultimately decided on Traders Studio...

I did like Wealth Lab,but there is no way I would want to be locked into Fidelity for execution and it is sometning you should think about...

Ami is a very powerful tool,but could never warm up to the language.And one of my major pe peeves is there is no phone/direct support.They do have email support,but IMHO,its just not the same as live help..

Traders Studios coding language is the cleanest and most powerful (to me).What I really like is Traders Studio's approach to backtesting.In a nutshell,Trader Studio divides systems into Sessions and Tradeplans. The sessions are the actual trading rules one has coded,and the tradeplan is the where the money management/position sizing algorithms reside...

This gives you unlimited flexibilty in running multiple sessions,multiple asset classes(optimising if you choose) and guaging the performance of your systems before any MM/PS is applied.
 
hmm... sounds like you are suggesting that i should lean towards something like amibroker (which is more powerful overall from what i have read) as opposed to wealth-lab and just suck up the difficulty factor... ?

thanks again!
 
I have used both Wealth Lab and AmiBroker. They are both very good programs, can't go wrong with either one. I prefer AmiBroker because of it's speed and ability to auto trade. Try Ami first as the price is lower and they have a great group on Yahoo
 
Quote from diligent:

hmm... sounds like you are suggesting that i should lean towards something like amibroker (which is more powerful overall from what i have read) as opposed to wealth-lab and just suck up the difficulty factor... ?

thanks again!
More...

I was in the exact same position you are in,and had to suck it up and am continuing to do so...The dilema is,we always underesimate what our needs are.We think we just want some simple coding,but I have found that I always wound up needing/wanting a more complex code to get the answer to the question ..

That is why I ultimately went with Traders Studio...Its VB like,which i found to be pretty digestable,and there are tons of resources that enabled me to learn the code.

Do not underestimate that point...I struggled with the Ami AFL code and could not find any good reference books.

And I personally found having live support exceedingly important.When you are stuck on something,its the ONLy way to go
 
Quote from diligent:

anyone else? do this few people actually backtest?

thanks again for any and all responses...
More...

Many people back test, but they use a wider selection of software than Wealth-Lab or Amibroker. The array of packages available is overwhelming, so it can take a lot of time to sort through the possibilities and find something suiting your near- and long-term needs.

I have not extensively used Wealth-Lab or Amibroker, so can't offer insight about them based on experience. As a suggestion, though, you could take advantage of Amibroker's free trial to see if it meets your needs and allows you room to grow. If it doesn't, you can always expand your search.
 
diligent,

I was in the same position as you and went to www.wealth-lab.com to see if i could go ahead and program some of my strategies and i couldn't get the code to do what I wanted to do. Unless you already have some programming wealth-lab has a very steep learning curve. I then looked at Amibroker and I picked it up very quickly. Although the systems I trade are not complex it didn't take very long for me to get it correct in Amibroker. Ambroker is a great value compared to wealth lab and their support only has email they have been very quick. They also have Yahoo groups that are very knowledgable.

Amibroker also has the ability to autotrade your systems with Interactive Brokers and has worked very well for me. Another thing that Amibroker does is let's you backtest a portfolio of stocks on the same system. Although I don't think it you can backtest multiple systems at the same time.

I haven't backtested anything in excel except single securities on single systems.

eric
 
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