I’ve been frustrated with Tradestation’s platform fees and the inability of the platform to test a strategy over a portfolio of securities.
After trying out AmiBroker over the last day, I am really impressed. Although it requires a data feed, the rest of the platform has been intuitive and a lot of fun to work with. I have a strong feeling that I will not need much else to take backtesting and system development to another level.
Look for some new AmiBroker generated reports soon.
As AmiBroker interfaces with Interactive Brokers for real-time data and charting, I am hoping that I can eventually get rid of Tradestation.
curious to how this works. Have you looked at TOS? Is tradestation above TOS in your opinion
Never used TOS.
how do amibrokers fees compare to tradestation? and when you say data feed are you referring to a site giving prices of stocks? thanks for the response btw
j0sh1ngU: AB has no fees – you pay for the software only.
Wood – welcome on-board – I told you it was cool! Still using Stockfetcher?
I heard it was very powerful and fooled around with it, but my sw IQ is soo low. So far I’ve gotten it nowhere, same with Merchant of Venice, RapidMiner, NinjaTrader, WealthLab, StrategyDesk, Genesis..
Damian, you were right! I will cancel stockfetcher as soon as I get the hang of the database and get all my filters/screens coded in AFL.
jOsh1ngU, AB just processes the data, allowing for all sorts of custom backtests and reports.
You must get the data from a data provider. I’m using premimumdata.net There is a typically a one-time fee for historical data ($67.00 for listed companies going back to 1985) and then a recurring monthly fee which pays for maintenance of the database (new companies, companies get delisted, splits, etc.) The monthly fee for US stocks is $27.23
Sooooo if I drop Tradestation and the 100.00/month platform fee, and I drop Stockfetcher at 18.00/month, my only monthly fee is for the data, so I’m saving about 90.00/month. Plus, I’m pretty certain that AB is going to be lightyears better than Tradestation.
I was under the impression trade station is free if you make a certain number of trades a month and from what i remember the number was very reasonable/low.
If you get your data from once source and charting etc on another — where do you book your trades?
Norgate will be really, really good next year with some of the upgrades that I’ve talked with them about. But Wood, I figured you’d be doing Tradersstudio…
Wood if you are primarily interested in EOD analysis why use a data provider when you can use yahoo finance?
I am also interested if you are more happy with AB than with TraderStudio because that was the one I was investigating the most?
Peon, you have to trade 5000 shares a month with Tradestation to avoid the platform fee.
While things will certainly change in the future, currently I’m mainly trading the indexes…So lets say I get short 50K of the SPY…that’s only 600 shares. So I haven’t made the minimum amount of shares in a long time. As I’m religiously trading only 1 system, as more systems come online, meeting the minimum may not be a problem.
Peon, booking the trades is the wild card right now. I am likely going to move my Tradestation account to Interactive Brokers which should integrate seamlessly with AB for real-time charting and booking trades.
The best of both worlds would be doing enough trades to keep the tradestation open without the platform fees…
Damian, Tradersstudio “seems” complicated and it is more expensive.
While I begin to learn higher level coding, I figured that less complicated and less expensive would be the way to go.
However, not having used Traderstudio, I may be wrong about the complicated part.
Tyler, you can user yahoo finance. In fact, AmiBroker makes a plug-in that will download data from yahoo finance, for free. However, I have to maintain the data.
Data maintenance can be a headache. For example, I just updated data from the past couple of days and at least two securities changed symbols or moved.
If a security splits, I have to handle that, if using yahoo.
I would prefer to pay someone else to maintain the data as data integrity is KEY for accurate backtesting and system development.
Tyler, BHH (if he reads this thread) and Damian can tell you a lot about Traderstudio.
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j0sh1ngU,
I think you have TOS no?
I had TradeStation and now use TOS.
TradeStation backtesting, strategies & rules trading are way superior.
I switched from TS to TOS as I have a standard account and a custodial IRA and TradeStation could not accommodate the custodial account where TOS integrated it all for me.
TOS was also willing to give me better (negotiated – not their standard rates – commissions on futures trades). I do like their Active Trader screens better than TradeStation – more intuitive and easier to digest it all (opinion only).
If you trade options, you know that TOS is flat-out the best platform. They are not shy to tell you that they developed the platform for options traders.
TOS customer service people are better – far less arrogant than TS.
Have you had any issues with their CME data feed?
I’ve had an occasional CME data feed lock-up and/or lag (time & sales as well as order confirmations) Last week I had at least 4 occasions where the feed just stopped for 10 seconds to 1 minute (always in high volume/volatility periods).
I have, in the past year (maybe 4 times) had 3-4 minute lags on order confirmations – let’s say you have a limit order and you watch the price cross your order but no indication that you have a fill and it still shows an open position. If you keep moving the order, you might show 2 or 3 open while you wait for the old ones to cxl. Frustrating… They will always blame the CME of course.
@manatrader – that’s a shame about Venice – what were you trying to do that didn’t work?
I believe Yahoo data is split adjusted – or rather, you can choose to use split or non-split adjusted in AB. Just an FYI.
@cuervos Thanks, couldn’t do much at all with it, although failure to RTFM (read the fucking manual) may have been a cause. It was a bit worse than the rest in that installation left me with a .jar file that didn’t open, although I did fix that. Moderate success with metastock has had me giving up on other sw pretty quickly, although I run up against its limitations quickly too – like I can optimize, but only for max profit, not other or several criteria.
@manatrader,
Well, it’s very true that reading manuals helps but, I agree with you on the poor state of the documentation. Most OSS is like that unfortunately, as the developers maintain the attitude of ‘Why document? It’s all there in the code’.
And most of my experience with software engineers reinforces my opinion that you really don’t want to read what they would write.
Anyone in their right mind would hire a good technical writer and let the coders do their coding.
That being said, I like Venice because I’m lazy and don’t like writing my own GA software for each equity.
Wood, when i did not trade enough to get the shares i’d simply buy 500 shares of SIRI or Java or any cheap but very liquid stock and them immediately sell for 1-2 pennies more (sometimes 1-2 pennies less). The round trip counts for a 1000 shares, i did it once a week till i had enough shares traded depending on what my system trades were doing that month.
you still have to the pay the commissions but it is a lot less than the platform fees ($150, as i pay for the radar screen strategies), and if you are nimble enough with the trades you can actually make up the commissions as well.
Born2, I have thought about doing that. Problem is that I’m not usually able to trade during the day.
The other thing is that I’m not very lucky…lol…I’d probably end up losing another 100 bucks just trying to turn a round trip!
WS,
I see two problems going with Amibroker and IB.
One problem is that it does not handle tick data very well due to design of the database. By default the database can only store 500000 records. This is only a couple days worth of ticks for many vehicles. You can modify the system registry to force AB to hold more ticks (say 10,000,000), but it stops working altogether at this point because the developer of AB chose to load the entire dataset into memory at once – even when you do not need it all it or just want 3200 tick bars. So, months of tick data is impossible. People have asked him (the developer) to change this in the past, but he claims that only a fraction of 1% of the people would want a better database structure, so it is not worth the effort.
The other problem is that IB gives you sampled tick data every approximately 0.2 seconds. So, you will not get every tick and may miss some prices as a result. IB does provide what the call 5 second bars that contain OHLC of the last 5 seconds, which you can store in AB. Once again, you cannot store many months of data of even 5 second bars because AB loads it all. I’ve been able to load upto 1,000,000 bars, but it starts getting kind of slow.
Of course, if you are using minute data, then you can store a whole year of data easily. I have aproximately 1.5+ years of minute data for numerous items, and it works very quickly with these. Even the currencies which have 700,000 or more bars work well.
TK
Hey Damian,
How’ve you been? I have been using AB more and more lately, you were right, it is nice and a hell of a lot faster than Trader Studio. Getting it finally plugged into my CSI database was the key. The way I see it shaking out is that AB gets used for primary development and perhaps things get ported over to Traders Studio when complete to test the affects of dividends and everything more accurately and to run multi-session tests with to see how it plays with other systems. I agree though that AB is the best “single” solution, if there is such a thing.
Long-time AB user here. Maybe 7 years now. Tomasz (the creator/developer) really knows his stuff.
Don’t forget to join the Yahoo support group at —
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/amibroker/
There are a few different Yahoo AB groups, depending on your focus…
can anyone elaborate a little bit about advantage to use AB comparing with TD or etrade’s trading app including TD strategy desk? Anyone use freestockcharts.com and compare with AB? thanks.