Traders' Roundtable

Hi

I've done all the searches thru this forum and several others including ET and traderclub.com, and i'm still confused as to which testing software to use

My main criteria is a software that is:

1. Capable of undertaking single contract testing of trading strategies
2. Examining the impact of various position sizing ideas with those trading strategies
3. Capable of doing portfolio analysis across mkts and trading strategies, eg. calculating correlations b/w trading strategies etc
4. Flexible program that allows most strategies and portfolio analysis to be programmed
5. Language that is logical/intuitive (i'm mathematical but not a professional programmer)
6. Not so worried about the $ cost, but more in terms of the 'lost' time to learn about the software if i had to switch down the track

After all my searches, i've narrowed it down to Trading Recipes & Wealth Lab, given they are the 2 which are currently available, most 'talked about', and can do the portolio analysis i'm talking about. (I'm not keen to wait for the releases of WinTR or VT 2.0, given i want to start testing quickly and would want to concentrate my energies on TR or Wealth Lab, and not both)

While all the other posts have been on TR vs VT or other sotware, i've yet to see posts on TR vs Wealth-Lab. While i understand the subset of users who use both software are small, i would appreciate if someone cld point out the pros and cons of TR vs Wealth-Lab.

Currently, i see the following points on TR and WealthLab:

TR
1. Dos based, which is ok with me except in its interface with Excel
2. Language is intuitive
3. Slow(?)
4. Can't see the code/formula behind the language (eg. if i want to make sure the calc of a MA is ok, i would have to run the same thing on excel and check the numbers, rather than look at the formula in TR) (?)
5. Built specifically for portfolio analysis so code is less clunky (?)

Wealth-Lab
1. Windows based
2. Language not as intuitive
3. Less formulas hardcoded so can check the formulas in your code (?)
4. Slow (?)
5. Portfolio Management more an add-in, rather than built specifically for that purpose, so code is clunky (?)

Given i don't have the TR software and still working thru the Wealth Lab demo, points 3,4 & 5 are the impression i get from the posts i've checked

Would appreciate any thoughts others might have on this

many thanks
jim

The vast majority of WL users seem to be stock traders, while the vast majority of TR users seem to be futures traders.

WL was just acquired by Fidelity and some people are worried about whether the software customers of WL will be abandoned by Fidelity.

(which is exactly what happened to the software customers of Omega Research)

If you would like to do a lot of research and you don´t know your system yet then I think you should go with veritrader because the speed is .... wow.

And I think the programmable version 2.0 will come soon.

I tried TR, use wealthlab and even bought tradersstudio. I would say don´t go with a dos application, because it calculates for example moving averages according to old software standards and it is slow with no stepping possibilities.

Nelson Freeburg in his Formular Research Volume V No 9 June 21, 1997 pointed out: "Recipes is geared to the professional rather than the casual user trader. You should be an experienced computer user. Documentation is scant. Expect little or no technical support. Graphics are cluncy. The DOS interface is antiquated. You cannot use a mouse. There is no optimzation feature. Processing time can be agonizingly slow."

If you would like to do a lot of research and like to step through 1000 or more variations of your parameters then Veritrader will be the solution.

I backtested a heavy trading application ( generated 19000 trades) using 28 markets (22 years of daily data) and one set of parameters (no stepping) in veritrader and wealthlab in order to get an indication for speed. Veritrader was about 25 times faster than wealthlab.

Helmut