| StockFetcher Forums · General Discussion · Thinkorswim as a back-testing tool | << >>Post Follow-up |
| guspenskiy13 976 posts msg #120527 - Ignore guspenskiy13 |
6/8/2014 7:09:42 PM Well, it's not really a "back-test" - as I and most people see it, back-test is a test on historical data for 3-5-10 years on multiple securities. However, this can give you a valuable insight - and it is also unique in some way - because you can choose any time-frame you want. Have you ever thought about the length of an indicator that you use? In terms of how effective it is? What made you pick one length of EMA over another? One length of stochastics over another? In past, I usually played with indicator's length and looked at the past performance....eye-balled the best length... Well, Thinkorswim has "STRATEGIES" tab...where you can make your own strategy with a decent amount of the most popular indicators.. And then you can look at the theoretical P/L - for any period from 10 days to years, depends on the time-frame you use. The cool feature is that you can pick any time-frame you want - very few back-testers can do that, they usually do daily values.... which is less suitable for day-trading. Sometimes couple points in length can make a difference... I am not saying that it's going to give you the most effective values - however, if the P/L is red - you have to think about the tools and its lengths that you use.  |
| guspenskiy13 976 posts msg #120528 - Ignore guspenskiy13 |
6/8/2014 7:19:09 PM One drawback of this tool - instead of showing you the total percentage gain, it shows you the dollar gain. It uses same share amount each time. This makes it a bit harder to calculate the real profit. 
Here I have TNA with a simple moving average strategy. It generated $9381.7 over the course of 10 days. We used position size of 1000, and average price of TNA during this time was $70.995. On average, this moving average strategy has made 13.2% in 10 days. |
| StockFetcher Forums · General Discussion · Thinkorswim as a back-testing tool | << >>Post Follow-up |