VT, TR, WLD, AmiBroker Which one for me?

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AlexT
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VT, TR, WLD, AmiBroker Which one for me?

Post by AlexT »

Hi every one, i have been reading forum for some time now with the purpose getting info on choosing which one to buy,

i know now that VT and TR is the best but the cost is high.
WLD also susggested but some one pointed out there are limitation on MM,

so far, AmiBroker is the lowest cost but seem not many post refer to it.

I want a software that has no limitation and has great development support on what i wanted to test, i currently use TS with much frastration because so many things i can not do. real regrad i got it 2 years ago.

this is VT forum but hope member can point out some objective opinion.
TC
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Post by TC »

Alex

Whatever you decide, make sure that price is at the bottom of the list of criteria you use to make your decision. The amount of money you will be putting at risk, especially trading futures, is most likely several orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the software you will need to give yourself enough of an edge to survive and hopefully prosper in this game.

To be blunt, if you have to factor in the cost of software, you are probably under-capitalised to trade futures. That is not to say cost is irrelevant, we all seek value for money and no one wants to be ripped off when buying anything. It is just that buying sub-optimal software to save money is a false economy and much worse can cause serious damage to your wealth !!

I have not made up my mind yet on Veritrader as I need to get more information first on what 2.0 will offer upon release and what is planned for the future, but I am becoming increasingly confident that it will take me beyond the limits of TradeStation in terms of system development and optimisation at the portfolio level.

Best of luck

Tom
AlexT
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Post by AlexT »

Tom,

you are right, my trading capital is small, i have lost most of it before i use Tradestation to back test. now i have recover abit but still in deep hole.

VT 2.0 seem very promissing, WinTR also, the cost is not a factor between these two but huge difference if compare to WLD and AmiBroker, i was thinking if the last two can do the job then i do not need the first two.

The cost of time used to learn and later found that have to switch is much more paintfull.

Ok, putting cost of software aside, can one say that buying VT1.6 now is the best because i can learn the basics and when VT2.0 is out i will be much faster learning it? or VT2.0 will be a new platform where i have to relearn from begining.
TC
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Post by TC »

VT 1.6 does not take me further than where I am currently in TradeStation with my own strategies written in EasyLanguage. I am therefore waiting for 2.0.

I am not very familiar with 1.6 but it seems that the strategies provided with the system offer an excellent starting point for traders still learning the basics.

2.0 should be released in the next few weeks/months so you dont have to wait too long to find out if it can offer you what you need

Good trading

PS Many US traders are also currently in a drawdown this year, myself included, so you are not alone in digging yourself out of a hole !!!
AlexT
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Post by AlexT »

hi all,

i have found my preference : WLD,
expert at ET says there is nothing that WLD3 can not do once one is proficient with it. and there is 30days trial that one can download.

thanks alot
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Post by WG »

I have switched to WLD 3.0 from Tradestation and I can tell you that it is definetly worth the price however that is entirely based on how you plan to use it.

In my case, I have it hooked up to the Qcharts realtime feed and mainly use it for short-term systematic index futures trading.

It is more than Qcharts in that I can write and test my own ideas. It is better than Tradestation in that I own the application and can hook it up to 3rd party feeds and/or 3rd party brokers.

The programming syntax is on-par with EasyLanguage.

If you are interested in longer term trading (anything based on daily bars and up) then this might be an overkill for you.

If you just want to test long term ideas, try looking into Stockwiz.

www.stockwiz.com

I think you will be surprised at how inexpensive you can get a great deal of testing done using their platform.

Best of luck.
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Post by AlexT »

i am still reading WLD user guide , function reference and WealthScript guide,
WLD may be over kill for me at the moment but i think as i grow, i do not need to switch to other platform, i learn metastock, then Tradestation and there is just too much restriction in these two. i hope i will not be restricted by WLD, so far so good, seems that it can do everything i wanted even though i am not able to use it fully yet.

VeriTrader may be very interesting, hopefully there is 30 days Demo like WLD available.

thanks
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Post by Forum Mgmnt »

I generally don't like to reply to questions like these until others not affiliated with Turtle Trading Software have had a chance to respond. I hate those forums where the answer to every question is "buy our product".

If I were to choose from the existing products, Wealthlab is certainly a product that I would seriously consider, no question. There is very little that you can't write in WealthLab that you'd want to do in actual trading.

To get the answer to the question you probably really have in your mind, I think you have to look at the reasons you are considering a back-testing solution to begin with. For most who are far enough along the path to consider spending hundreds or thousands of dollars, and then many hours learning to develop system, the reason is that they want make sure their trading is the best it can be. In short, they believe that a good back-testing solution will help them be better traders.

Others are simply looking to get enough confidence in trading strategies that they will be willing to pull the trigger.

While price certainly is a factor in a decision like this because none of us want to pay more for something than we have to; if your intent is to become a trading professional, then it becomes a secondary or tertiary factor. The real issue is how much the software helps you become a better trader, how much it helps you learn, and does it help you build better systems.

The best source of any comparison between WealthLab and VeriTrader in this regard is our Beta Testers. I know that several of them have used both products, they can certainly give you specifics about the differences with the current alpha version and WealthLab 3.0.

Based on my having played with WealthLab Developer 3.0 a bit, I can tell you that from my admittedly biased perspective VeriTrader is:
  1. Much, much faster - perhaps hundreds of times faster running tests
  2. More Integrated - WealthLab seems more like a toolkit where the tools are exposed and you can use them but they are always there for you too see. VeriTrader is designed to be used by non-programmers so you don't have to see and use the tools if you don't want to.
  3. Better at Analysis - reporting is more integrated, more complete and easier to access.
  4. Much easier to use - you can install VeriTrader and be up and running within minutes. WealthLab seems like it was designed by programmers with little regard for those who weren't programmers.
  5. More research oriented - VeriTrader was designed from the beginning as a research tool, it has supported multi-strategy, multi-portfolio testing from the very beginnings of it's designs, not as version 3.0 add ons. In VeriTrader you work with entries, exits, systems, portfolios, money management algorithms, etc. not charts and chart scripts. It's hard to really comprehend what this means unless you try both products but it's pretty obvious after you do.
For version 2.0, we will be providing either a fully functional demo version of 2.0, or a 30 day money-back guarantee. If we do provide the demo, its release will lag the release of 2.0 by a few weeks as we want to make sure we take care of our customers before our prospects and we expect a lot of upgrades and new customers when 2.0 is released.

While we're obviously proud of the work we've done, I try not to push VeriTrader because I believe that our job is to make the product good enough that you'll want to buy it without pushy salesmanship. I believe that VeriTrader will stand on its own merits and that after the release of 2.0 and the trading integration planned for the following version, a side-by-side comparison will be decided in our favor almost all of the time.

- Forum Mgmnt
Ghostrider
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code

Post by Ghostrider »

Forum Mgmnt,
I own a copy of V-trader, and it has its merits, thank you for creating it. My question now is, will you disclose the C++ code for anything in it?

:P
Last edited by Ghostrider on Mon Oct 18, 2004 5:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
WG
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VeriTrader vs. WLD

Post by WG »

Having not evaluated VeriTrader firsthand, I cannot really draw comparisons, however one apparent distinction that I can make is that WLD can be used (my case) as a trading tool. I doubt that it would be as sophisticated as VT as a testing platform however out-of-the-box, it connected to QCharts on one hand and InteractiveBrokers on the other.

In this respect, it compares very favourably to TradeStation. In essence, you get a technical package with a seamless real-time data-feed on one end. Where you can build a system that sends orders to your broker (IB in my case), again seamlessly.

I have to say that I did notice that more complex studies are very taxing on the resources of the machine that WLD runs on. A good part could be my own doing (sloppy system coding) but I also suspect that the application is inherently a not very fast one.

For my trading needs based on intraday (5 minute bars), on a 1.8 GHz P4 with 256MB ram, it runs adequately.
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Post by AlexT »

IMHO, however good or bad a product, there are always people who like and dislike them, it is good for user to play with it for 30 days before deciding which platform to stick to, for example, after looking at Trading Recipes, no mater how good the user may comment, it is not for me just because it is dos based.

also people may not want Linux even it can be free and like Mac even it is expensive.

IMHO, best way to determine which one is best for oneself is to try out before buy. listening to recommandation is not as good because others do not know what his want, need and circumstances.

hope VeriTrader2.0 will be avalable soon. followed by 30 days fully functional trial.
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Post by Roberts »

Re: c.f.' comments on Wealth-Lab, I'll agree with 1. - compiled programs do indeed run much faster than non-compiled, interpreted scripts. The trade-off here is one of flexibility. Each time you want to modify a system's basic rules (not just the parameters), it's a simple matter for a script, but it's impossible for anyone without developers' tools to do the same for a compiled program like Veritrader.

Nevertheless, Wealth-Lab has features to allow developers to compile [their own] sophisticated trading systems and execute them at speeds comparable with any other tech analysis software. Likewise, Wealth-Lab also has tools for non-programmers, like the drag and drop New ChartScript Wizard for building [your own] trading systems without writing a single line of code.
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Post by contrarian »

Roberts,

Not quite sure what you're saying. i.e. What are you saying that VT cannot do that WL can?

Cheers
Steve
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Post by Forum Mgmnt »

I'll agree with 1. - compiled programs do indeed run much faster than non-compiled, interpreted scripts. The trade-off here is one of flexibility. Each time you want to modify a system's basic rules (not just the parameters), it's a simple matter for a script, but it's impossible for anyone without developers' tools to do the same for a compiled program like Veritrader.
Actually, my experience building software for almost 25 years indicates that good performance is more a matter of good design versus ad-hoc addition of features. In this specific case, it also comes from designing with high-speed analsysis of trading systems versus charting and drawing indicators.

The fact is, that the SCRIPTING version of VeriTrader 2.0 (in alpha testing and soon to go to Beta) is about 2 to 3 times FASTER than the 1.6 COMPILED version for the Triple Moving Average system. :shock: This is is a fairly complex system with fairly complex scripting.

Anyone who tells you that scripting is the reason why TR or WealthLab is slow is just plain wrong. There is nothing inherent in scriptability that requires the speed penalty which one must currently pay. It may be that their implementation of scripting is the reason why they are slow but it is not scripting itself, as will soon be obvious to all. :)

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Post by sluggo »

System Writer Plus and Tradestation (both from Omega Research) actually compiled the user's "Easy Language" into machine code. All it took was an embedded Pascal compiler with the EL extensions and libraries. Fortunately, Pascal compilers were available for free, thanks to UCSD.

Any of Omega's competitors could do the same thing if they really wanted to. Thus blurring the distinction between "scripted" and "compiled" system test engines.
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Post by ksberg »

sluggo wrote:System Writer Plus and Tradestation (both from Omega Research) actually compiled the user's "Easy Language" into machine code. All it took was an embedded Pascal compiler with the EL extensions and libraries. Fortunately, Pascal compilers were available for free, thanks to UCSD.
I've never heard the UCSD p-system mentioned in conjuntion with TradeStation EL. Is this speculation, or it's actual lineage?

Kevin
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Post by Forum Mgmnt »

sluggo brings up a good point. There is nothing about the ease of the language that constrains the ultimate speed of the execution of the resulting systems.

Another interesting development over the last 10 years of so is the advance of technologies that blur the distinction between between compiled code and the traditionally interpreted scripting languages.

Things like byte codes first popularized by the aforementioned UCSD Pascal an their p-code, then java later both are partially compiled. Add technologies like JIT (or Just-in-Time) compilers to byte code interpreters, and scripting can approach the pure speed of compiled machine code. Or one can take the approach mentioned by sluggo and take the scripting all the way to compiled code.

When designing the scripting in VeriTrader 2.0 we intentionally took an approach that would allow us to implement a full compiler if we needed it for speed. As it turns out we got excellent performance using only partial compilation technology so a full machine code compiler wasn't necessary.

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Post by AlexT »

Forum Mgmnt,
Since VT2 is now alpha testing, can i download the usermanual to see how easy is it to learn? if it is as easy as promissed, i better giveup learning WLD now.
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