I am not a day trader
I am not day trading, thus I base my tests on end of day information. In the evening I fetch my data from the stocks I am interested in. This is
all stocks on the Swedish stock exchange. I get them from a server, buying the
data support from Börsinsikt. I do a lot on the incoming data before I decide
what to trade and what not to trade. The decisions are based on my
systems, all
of them tested against all stocks on the Swedish stock exchange, all of them
statistically profitable on the dates I have run the tests against.
The
assumption is always the same in the systems: I will buy the stock the next day,
and I will buy it for whatever price is currently set by the market. I will then
keep the stock until one evening I get a signal to sell it, and I will then sell
it the following day, to whatever price is set by the market.
My test environment is Tradestation, running on data from Börsinsikt plus own special programs
I keep all old stock information, also for stocks nowadays not available on
the market (if you had traded then, the profit or loss would have been there,
independent of if the stock exists today or not). I enter the system in such a
way that I can later on run another program on the trade information, doing
calculations on things like
- cost for commission
- profit/loss
- win per trade
- percentage
winning trades
- winning trades in a row
- losing trades in a row
- maximum
drawback
- largest losing trade
- largest winning trade
- total profit
- number of
trades
- number of winning trades
- number of losing trades
- profit earned on
winning trades
- profit earned on losing trades
- return on investment
Tradestation limits does not limit my tests
Tradestation is, strangely enough, not built so it can itself test systems
over multiple stocks without additional programs.
This has meant that I have had to
develop a way to do these tests by my own, and so I have. I can emulate every
type of buying/exiting/shorting behavior I have seen so far. I can handle limit and
stop orders, and I can handle entries/exits based on today's values as well as
values on the next day. I can handle trade baskets, and I can handle information on starting trade account, ...
Headlines
Never trade stocks without having tested your system. In fact, most trading systems are not profitable if tested over many stocks. Full story...
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