MoneyTec 2.0 - Online Forex Traders & Brokers Social Networking Community » Trading Methodologies » Tools of the Trade

[hotoracle]

Does anyone know of any applications that will back test Forex trading strategy's.

Are there any recommendations!

Ian

[MattC]

hotoracle

I have been using Amibroker. It takes a while to get the hang of the code, but if you have experience with Excel you will find it easier. It's price is $200 US, which is cheap compared to some and it does offer quite a lot (programmable alerts etc). Overall I have been happy with it.

Matt

[hotoracle]

Thanks Matt,

What data feed do you use with it and how much historical data do you have. Can you purchase the historical data for the PAIRS.


Ian

[pricerxl]

I use Amibroker and Wealth-Lab.

Amibroker is one of the best backtesting package available (the 4.5 will introduce major features like Multiple Time Frame, Portfolio Backtesting, MAE, MFE histograms, ...). AFL Langage is easy and very powerfull.

Wealth-Lab is the most powerfull trading system software I never used. It's THE ultimate backtest tool. ActiveTrader staff use it for the Trading System Lab.

I use two data sources. The first is FXCM (Stratagem Export), the second is MG Financial (MG Charts Export). My lowest TimeFrame is set to 1 hour but I download 2hours, 4hours, day and week on MG Charts.


PricerXL

[Samael]

I have found Wealth LAb to be very useful software. Mainly because it has a very simple and logical language for writing systems, called Wealth Script. Wealth Lab has only an active forum which will help you to solve your problems. Last but not least, you can debug your systems quite easily.

[Medran]

Backtesting can be very simple for very simple strategies but entirely impossible (if using a high-level tool) for complex strategies.

For example... if you want to test a strategy that uses multiple time frames (enter when weekly is up and daily is up and find entry with hourly for example) I'm not sure there is any off-the-shelf package that will enable this to be programmed usingcontempory trading package scripting languages (do tell if I am wrong).

All packaged solutions (like TradeStation, surely one of the best) put the user inside a box. Depending upon how sophisticated the software is some boxes can be bigger than others.

Creating your own "from the ground up" back testing solution using a lower level language takes you outside the box but with today's programming technololgy you have to be a (very) gifted programmer to accomplish this (hopefully this will change in the future).

The scary thing (for me) is that it is very difficult to find any reasonable strategy that actually loses money in the long term and it is hard to reconcile this with the oft-quoted "95% losers" perception.

Have fun