Testing Strategies

[ysettle]

If I wanted to test a strategy between 2 stocks - for example RCL and CCL and see how one performed versus the other ahead of key dates (earnings, dividends) is there a free program i can use to make a strategy and see what the results would be

for example, if I wanted to buy 100 shares of RCL and sell the same dollar value of CCL 3 days before the ex-dividend date, is there a program that can tell me the historical return of that strategy and perhaps allow me to play with the days ie (buy/sell 4 days before ex, 3 days before ex and 2 days before ex, and then the ideal period to exit the trade after the dividend is paid)


Thank you in advance

 

[Felix168]

Hi YSettle,

there are a bunch of free programs out there, both free as in beer, and free as in speech. If you are looking for the latter, I am the maintainer of TuringTrader, which is well able to do what you are looking for.

Cheers, Felix

 

[Pekelo]

Yes, if you sing up at collective2.com the first 2 weeks is free and you can practice/test your ideas...

 

[GlobalMacro90]

If I wanted to test a strategy between 2 stocks - for example RCL and CCL and see how one performed versus the other ahead of key dates (earnings, dividends) is there a free program i can use to make a strategy and see what the results would be

for example, if I wanted to buy 100 shares of RCL and sell the same dollar value of CCL 3 days before the ex-dividend date, is there a program that can tell me the historical return of that strategy and perhaps allow me to play with the days ie (buy/sell 4 days before ex, 3 days before ex and 2 days before ex, and then the ideal period to exit the trade after the dividend is paid)


Thank you in advance

It definitely takes work to learn how to code in Python but Quantopian is a very powerful free platform to test trading strategies. It will be frustrating at first learning to code in Python, but the effort will be well worth it. I think its one of the best skills at trader can have these days, and will only get more valuable as time goes on.

 

[raddo]

What you have proposed is a very simple strategy. On your place, I would download all data to Excel (prices + dates of events) and then do an analysis in plain, old and simple Excel.