Don't listen to ET complainers here too much, Tradestation will be enhancing their plateform for sure, use them but trade elsewhere
getting serious: wealth-lab vs amibroker
- Thread starter diligent
- Start date
I certainly wasnt complaning about TradeStation..Its a very good product that unfortunately took forever for certian upgrades......
My major gripe with Tradestation is the fact that they are in the banking business/brokerage business.If you are fully invested at all times,its no big deal.But a 400-500 bps funding spread is a bit much...
Also,what are the costs of tradeStation if you trade/clear elsewhere??
Murray Ruggiero
Sponsor
TradersStudio allow you to do backtesting on as little as 1 min intervals at the portfolio level. It also allow you to do dynamic money management backtesting at the same level.
Here is a overview of TradersStudio
http://www.tradersstudio.com/Overview/tabid/68/Default.aspx
When I decided to return to trading about 3 years ago, I looked at both Amibroker and Wealth Lab. Wealth Lab at the time was not bought out by Fidelity.
Wealth Lab was a predominantly web based application with a separate $600 stand alone expert package that you could get for advanced apps. Amibroker came as either a end of day or a real-time version for $80 more, and sat on your computer.
As a person with some programming chops (Basic, Pascal), I looked at both languages. Both were not simple. Wealth lab's wasn't as elegant as Amibroker's, although Ami definitely has some non-intuitive ways of doing some core functions that all current amibroker users know about but that you may have to search long and hard through the message archives to learn about.
At that point I chose Amibroker, and have used it since. I really spent a LOT of time learning AFL the first year. The learning curve is not easy.
But, for a program that
1. You own. It sits on your computer and you will always own it. You may not be able to upgrade it, but it will always work for what it is supposed to do. You won't have to worry about it being bought out by someone (wealthlab by Fidelity) or becoming unsupported due to a change in business model(Tradestation 2000), or not being able to access the internet to use it (because its web based). If your computer breaks, well, you're SOL. But so are you with the rest of them.
2. Backtests like something the proprietary (not prop shop, but the big boys) use.
3. Does a fine job of charting
4. Downloads EOD data for free (if you don't feel like paying for something exotic, etc...)
5. Has an active online community (amibroker user's group on Yahoo)
I don't think it can be beat.
Wealth Lab was a predominantly web based application with a separate $600 stand alone expert package that you could get for advanced apps. Amibroker came as either a end of day or a real-time version for $80 more, and sat on your computer.
As a person with some programming chops (Basic, Pascal), I looked at both languages. Both were not simple. Wealth lab's wasn't as elegant as Amibroker's, although Ami definitely has some non-intuitive ways of doing some core functions that all current amibroker users know about but that you may have to search long and hard through the message archives to learn about.
At that point I chose Amibroker, and have used it since. I really spent a LOT of time learning AFL the first year. The learning curve is not easy.
But, for a program that
1. You own. It sits on your computer and you will always own it. You may not be able to upgrade it, but it will always work for what it is supposed to do. You won't have to worry about it being bought out by someone (wealthlab by Fidelity) or becoming unsupported due to a change in business model(Tradestation 2000), or not being able to access the internet to use it (because its web based). If your computer breaks, well, you're SOL. But so are you with the rest of them.
2. Backtests like something the proprietary (not prop shop, but the big boys) use.
3. Does a fine job of charting
4. Downloads EOD data for free (if you don't feel like paying for something exotic, etc...)
5. Has an active online community (amibroker user's group on Yahoo)
I don't think it can be beat.
I agree with the previous poster. Same experience with Amibroker. I use it extensibely, and I found a programmer to help me out with workarounds for a very reasonable fee when I can't do it myself. ( Files, advanced backtesting, scaling, etc) Most of the complex stuff actually gives no edge to me anyways... so you can do 99% of what you want without help.
LOL, you're a very confused boy. Are you sure you're not a systematic trader who believes in a discretionary approach?