ts questions

Have 2 questions regarding tradestation:

1) Does tradestation take into account of ask bid data when backtesting? Cos there is a difference if ask bid data is not used in backtesting.

2) When buy sell rules in tradestation only in effect on the second bar and not on the entry bar? Excep for setstoploss, all rules are not in effect in the entry bar.

Any price shown on a chart is going to be just a price. In real life it may have been the actual bid price or the actual ask price, but on the chart it is just a price. You will be unsure if the price shown would have actually been the bid or the ask.

EL code is an event driven language and the event that drives it will be the closing of a bar. You can use intrabar order generation and persistant variables and run your strategy on a tick by tick basis so that the next bar is actually the next tick.

Your number (1) is a really interesting question.

I use end-of-day data so what my chart shows is what the futures exchange reports as the OHLC for the day - but whether they base that on the actual trades or on the bid-ask, I don't know.

For live feeds, I have no idea but I assume you see the bid-ask on the screen in a data window and you can compare that with the chart to see what it's showing you. You can probably configure the chart window yourself.

I guess it also varies between different exchanges.