Noob Question

[pedro01]

Hi All

I'm a bit of a newb, have done a bit of spreadbetting after studying the Ian Williams Trading the easy way course. Personally, I think the course falls way short of giving a profitable trading strategy but I did learn a lot. Not as much as I have learnt from reading "High Probability Trading" by Marcel Link. The book cost me $26 but the Ian Williams course cost me $1000. You live & learn.

So now, I'm interested in formulating my own tradng system as well as investigating the profitability of some 'off the peg' strategies I have read about on here & in various books.

It seems to me that tradestation offers the ability to do this. Do they allow you to use the software for backtesting only ? I couldn't find a link on their site for this and when I hit 'apply for an account' I ended up with a 36 page form to fill in. At the moment, I don't want to use tradestation to trade, just to backtest. Do I really need to open a trading account to do this ?

Any ideas of the costs involved with using Tradestation as a backtesting tool ? Can it be used to backtest with different types of instrument such as CFDs & spread bets ?

If not tradestation, any ideas on what other tool can be used to backtest ?

Many thanks

Pete

 

[pedro01]

duh - found it already ;-) $249 a month + a little bit for the extra data I need.

Not too bad considering they have 24 years of data to backtest with !

 

[Niove]

You will find tradestation the best entry level platform to automated trading. I 'd go through the trouble of opening an account as it will cost you a lot less than taking up on an educational package.

 

[StratOpt]

If you did trade through TradeStation even remotely frequently then the $249 dollar monthly fee will get waived and all you are left with are the data fees.

 

[StratOpt]

I have sent out over 500,000 contracts to the eMini futures markets using nothing but TradeStation and I don't think I have been hurt one iota in terms of speed of execution or accuracy. I am also a DayTrader and develop for DayTraders and consult for DayTraders and Swing Traders alike as well as give strategy development workshops and all on the TradeStation platform. There are things wrong with about everything if you look hard enough. Ain't nothing perfect for sure, and TS is sure not perfect either, but they are not going to be the difference between you making it and not due to any inherant issues.

 

[pedro01]

I have sent out over 500,000 contracts to the eMini futures markets using nothing but TradeStation and I don't think I have been hurt one iota in terms of speed of execution or accuracy. I am also a DayTrader and develop for DayTraders and consult for DayTraders and Swing Traders alike as well as give strategy development workshops and all on the TradeStation platform. There are things wrong with about everything if you look hard enough. Ain't nothing perfect for sure, and TS is sure not perfect either, but they are not going to be the difference between you making it and not due to any inherant issues.

I agree.

Let's face facts here - Mavrik00 is selling Ninja training - so he's hardly unbiased.