Remedial Help

D

dgooden

I have traded stocks for some time now but only recently have I become interested with TA and system based trading. I am a ILR/statistics student at Cornell and I would like to take a few classes that might help my endeavors in trading. Other than EASYLangugage (I just opened a Tradestation account) are there any computer languages or aspects of programming/math I should study (Visual Basic, C++, Number Theory????)? Moreover, could anyone recommend some good books on trading and trading systems that might spark some profound thoughts? One more, does anyone know of a way(someone told me interactive broker does it??) to input realtime data into excel just to calculate some basic statistical stuff? Help with any of the aforementioned questions would be much appreciated. Sincere Thanks.
Chase Culeman-Beckman
my email is Lnkwray@aol.com
 
For a decent starter book you could try:

"Technical Traders Guide to Computer Analysis of the Futures Market" by Le Beau, Lucas

It's focus is futures, but the system building and testing guidance applies across markets. Also, covers basic TA concepts if I remember correctly.

On the Excel data, IB provides for a DDE link into another Windows program, typically Excel. They have info in their user guide on their website and also in their forum. ESignal and others also provide the DDE link. Unfortunately, I don't think Tradestation offers this capability (yet). Even with the DDE link, you need to be fairly good at Excel and VBA to do much beyond basics.

This site is pretty good for ideas, getting questions answered, etc., if you can wade through a lot of 'stuff' first.

Good luck.
 
Quote from dgooden:

thanks alot that will take me some time to pursue.
Chase
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Stupid question, but I was wondering about the origination of your Elite Trader handle "dgooden".

Does it have anything to do with Drew Gooden???? Like I said, stupid question.
 
Quote from dgooden:

I have traded stocks for some time now but only recently have I become interested with TA and system based trading. I am a ILR/statistics student at Cornell and I would like to take a few classes that might help my endeavors in trading. Other than EASYLangugage (I just opened a Tradestation account) are there any computer languages or aspects of programming/math I should study (Visual Basic, C++, Number Theory????)? Moreover, could anyone recommend some good books on trading and trading systems that might spark some profound thoughts? One more, does anyone know of a way(someone told me interactive broker does it??) to input realtime data into excel just to calculate some basic statistical stuff? Help with any of the aforementioned questions would be much appreciated. Sincere Thanks.
Chase Culeman-Beckman
my email is Lnkwray@aol.com
More...

I might be biased due to my academic background, but I would strongly recommend you take some graduate level econometics along with the stats (also grad level) you might have taken already. As for the languages, besides the ones you listed, I'd say a command of an econometrics package like SAS or TSP or STATA would be good for testing stuff. I use TSP, VB, and R/SPlus for smaller projects and SAS if smth big comes up b/c it seems to handle big datasets the best.
Also, on top of (or instead of) getting real time data (which restricts your data set somewhat b/c you don't wanna wait forever to gather data), you can contact the finance department at the school of business there. I'm 100% certain as school as good as theirs would have NYSE TAQ (intraday transactions and quotes) dataset for at least 5-8 years. All trades and quotes for all stocks on US exchanges. One year is like 120 CDs or so. It's expensive to buy for nonacademic use, but I'm sure they'll let you use theirs if you ask the right people... (Besides, they probably have it on the server anyway so you just have to get permission to access it). That way you can test your stuff using some random periods and use other periods for out of sample tests etc.
Good Luck.
 
when you say sysyem books do you mean books dedicated entirely to trading systems? just wondering because I have found only one of those in schools libraries. thanks.
Dwight
 
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