Traders' Roundtable

I have been trading for 20 years, primarily on a proprietary pascal based trading platform.

That platform for many reasons is no longer viable.

I am looking at either Mechanica or Tradingbloxs using continuous contracts in ascii as my data source end of day (o,h,l,c).

My main needs are

1. Ability to trade and analyze multiple models or systems at once with multiple markets.

2. Back test and analyze various models both sperately and together
A. The models each trade different portfolio of markets
B. The models trade using different amount of $ risk with Max and Min # of contracts per million $ for each market in the portfolio.
C. Also test using 1 contract per million
D. Models trade multiple entry slots

3. Test various parameters

4. I need to be able to spit out various technical info and data from the systems daily as well as provide orders for the next day, stops, limits, SCO's

5. Needs to be able to caculate order size in contracts per million$ based on risk parmaters built into the systems

6. Run risk overlays on individual and multiple systems

7. Create and do the same for new systems.

8. I don't to track customer positions with this but it would be useful to track a model or hypotetical accounts positions?

I think that fairly covers it. I originally was looking at Mechanica when I discovered tradingbloxs. There is a significant cost difference between these two products.

Please let me know your opinions on these two products or anything else that might be a better option.

Thanks

No offense but I would expect your natural inclination would be to purchase both and see how you like each of them, yourself. I would expect a 20 year trader would be more inclined to tinker and experiment for themselves, rather than believing what is said by a bunch of complete strangers on a vendor-sponsored chat site. I would also expect you'd use logic similar to this hyperlink and decide that the purchase price of trading software is less than one AverageTrueRange on a single contract position in Natural Gas futures. I imagine you trade significantly more than one contract at a time in Natural Gas.

A half dozen regular posters here on this site, own both programs, and I'll bet that none of them regret purchasing both.

I myself have purchased Trading Blox, Trading Recipes, Tradestation, Behold, AmiBroker, Wealth-Lab Developer, and perceive that I've gotten good value for my money in each one. I don't regret any of these purchases. So my natural inclination is to recommend you consider getting both.

I appreciate your post. I guess I am wondering where to start. If both can provide what I need I would choose the cheaper one. I am most concerned with testing what I already have created as opposed to creating new stuff.

I don't see why I would spend 25k if the trading blocks meets my needs for 3k. That may just be me though.

Can both products meet the needs I outlined? I am somewhat uneducated about outside software. I previously employed code writers to do what I wanted but no longer want to allocate the resouces that way.

Thanks again for responding.

DMBAO

I must say, I'm with you on this one. I too would draw the line on cost grounds as far as Mechanica is concerned. But who knows what I might be missing?

I do know from his previous posts that Jake Carriker owns both products. I would feel comfortable with a comparison between the two products from Jake.

But in any event, you can not go far wrong with an investment in TBB.

Thanks for the reply.

I am not against spending the money if Mechanica better meets my needs. If I can do what I need on trading bloxs all the better. I just need to do something.

My systems really haven't changed in years and have done reasonably well. I don't change often but certainly want to continue doing research.

My downside is I have little programing experience as someone else always has coded my ideas previously. So conversion factor and cost is a concern.

Hopefully others will chime in.

I really appreciate the help everyone provides as this is an area for which I know little.

Thanks

The following link may be helpful.

viewtopic.php?t=2432&highlight=trading+blox+mechanica

[MOD: above forum area has been archived]

Since above link started, TBB has evolved significantly. I am not a Mechanica user. But rather a happy TBB user. For me, TBB has been a good investment.

For me one of the reasons why I bought TB is the support from Tim and the TB community on this forum. It is outstanding and extremely responsive. I believe this can not be underestimated especially if you need access to programming. I visited Tim before my purchase and he helped me very promptly also during my trial period. I do not own or considered owning Mechanica (cost!) but was looking seriously into Trading Recipes before purchasing TB. In addition I do use many other technical programs some of which do offer some back testing capability but none of them are as thorough as TB never mind TB's far superior support.

dmbao wrote:I appreciate your post. I guess I am wondering where to start. If both can provide what I need I would choose the cheaper one. I am most concerned with testing what I already have created as opposed to creating new stuff.

I don't see why I would spend 25k if the trading blocks meets my needs for 3k. That may just be me though.

Can both products meet the needs I outlined? I am somewhat uneducated about outside software. I previously employed code writers to do what I wanted but no longer want to allocate the resouces that way.

Thanks again for responding.

I too will be delighted to read from people having both Mechanica and TBB.

I think the point is "Is there something than Mechanica can do (and TBB cannot) to justify a 25k price tag"?

Some time ago I read that Mechanica can also help the back office operations of CTAs/trading firms, but being a private trader this is not so important for me.

I'm talking about testing capabilities and for 25K I guess I'd like to test almost anything that comes to mind (i.e. stop the trading any month with a loss greater than X%, or some king of "Equity curve" trading).

As a matter of fact the comparision shoul be done between TBB and WinTR (I bought DOS - TR about two years ago, as they were saying a window version should be expected in a few months, and upgrading will cost a few hundred bucks) but I suspect they has been delaying WinTR because the difference in price with Mechanica is just too high to be accepted by corporate customers (but that is just my guess).