Financial Trading Software? 48
finance-geek asks: "What software do you use for trade evaluation? Are there any good free programs out there? I am a former programmer now working at an investment fund, and I am shocked at the limited number of applications for evaluating and back-testing trading models. We currently use Wealth Lab , but since they were recently purchased by Fidelity, we are less certain about the future of their customer service. I checked out SourceForge.net but only a few programs looked interesting, and it will take me a while to evaluate them. Any suggestions?"
ETF Timing (Score:3, Informative)
It's not free, and I'm not generally one to plug a specific site or product, but it is on-topic.
Re:ETF Timing (Score:5, Informative)
You can market time them. You can market time anything. That doesn't make it a good idea. You need extraordinary gains to overcome brokerage fees and taxes (which are higher since you're not holding them for at least a year).
If you want my advice...read _A Random Walk Down Wall-Street_ and unless you have the equivalent of several full-time jobs to devote on an ongoing basis, buy broad indexes (e.g., Wilshire, with S&P 500 being a second choice) and get on with your life. If you're socking away a thick 401K + Roth IRAs for most of your working life, you'll retire rich and making 12% instead of 10.5% (historical S&P 500 average) isn't going to make that much of a difference...but making 3% once you factor in your losses from amateur play sure will.
All deference to the Warren Buffets of the world aside, very (very!) few pros, usually backed by huge research desks, beat the S&P 500 over the long term. That's just as true for small funds as large ones.
Again, _A Random Walk Down Wall Street_ is the best book on investing I've ever read and I highly recommend it.
Re:ETF Timing (Score:2, Informative)
The one point I really must take issue with is that the difference between 10.5% and 12% is minimal. If you start saving for retirement at 25 with a small account, say $5000, and contribute $200 monthly until retirement at 65, that extra 1.5% will translate to an additional $1,155,622 at retirement. That is well worth the
Re:ETF Timing (Score:2)
A Book I would recommend for new investors is Peter Lynch's One up on Wall Street [amazon.com]
Firstly, it explains simple economic fundamentals for those who are not aware of them.
Secondly, and more importantly... it explains something important about why people loose a lot of money on Wall Street: They compete against the pros on Wall Street. Don't invest in IBM, or Ford, or the big blue chips because thousands of analysts who are better at these things are doi
Re:ETF Timing (Score:2)
Your answer is obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most likely reason for a lack of free software for this application is it's not common for someone to have experience programming and this sort of thing.
You are in this unique position, so I would recommend you start such a project yourself.
Or better yet (Score:2)
Re:Your answer is obvious... (Score:2)
I would modify this statement to say that it is not common for someone to be (a) an experienced programmer, (b) working in the investment field, and (c) not tied up with a company that insists on keeping the development work private. There are lots of firms doing lots of work to try and identify profitable patterns in stock, bond and index prices
Re:Your answer is obvious... (Score:2)
I would modify this statement to say that it is not common for someone to be
Well, the poster did say that (s)he is a "former programmer", so (s)he doesn't appear to be under (her/)his company's thumb in (her/)his current position.
Then again, it does look like (s)he's trying to make a recommendation of software to evaluate to the company... so the company is already looking for software on the outside... so the below
Let me know if you find one. (Score:2)
Data is the challenge, not the software... (Score:3, Informative)
And if you want intra-day data, the data problems become even bigger. I guess quite a few of the Technical Analysis services have historical data for testing TA models, but from what I have found there are few cheap and good sources for fundamental company data which also offer historical data.
Re:Data is the challenge, not the software... (Score:1)
The
As somebody who writes this stuff during the day.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And, even if they'd *like* to, exchange rules *forbid* vendors from giving away real-time (i.e. non delayed-by-20-minutes) feeds.
I think, for the most part, if you don't have a lot of money, sophisticated tools are a waste of time, because you'd get better results putting them into mutual funds, bonds, ETFs, and savings accounts. If you've got a lot of money, the cost for some good tools (and a data vendor who properly scrubs the data) is money well spent.
Re:It sounds like you're trying to game the system (Score:1)
Re:It sounds like you're trying to game the system (Score:2)
Re:It sounds like you're trying to game the system (Score:2)
You have to remember that the stock market is not a zero-sum game. It doesn't help that there's no good way to value a corporation, which clouds things slightly.
However, the "value" of a company changes over time. I put that in quotes, because there's no exact number that your average trader can figure out, but for convenience, we'll assume that there is. When you buy a stock, you are paying $X for $Y of value, where X > Y.
Now, let's say that nobody ha
GeniusTrader, and optsys (soon) for options... (Score:5, Informative)
First, check out GeniusTrader [geniustrader.org], which is a very usable tool for backtesting strategies.
A friend of mine and I are writing software for backtesting options trading strategies. It will also be GPLed and some of the architecture is based on the way GeniusTrader did things. GeniusTrader is written in Perl and optsys is being written in C++.
optsys, or what's been done of it (it's in maaaaaaaajor pre-alpha state right now, most features aren't even working yet) is available here [stile65.mine.nu], but since I'm running the server on my home PC, it's only up about 14-18 hours a day. GeniusTrader, however, is immediately usable and they have quite a developer/user community now.
Re:GeniusTrader, and optsys (soon) for options... (Score:2)
Re:GeniusTrader, and optsys (soon) for options... (Score:2)
Other than that it'll be just like stock trading. If you want to simulate gamma scalping, you'll be able to. If you want to simulate trading various spreads under different market conditions, you'll be able to do that too. I don't foresee the toolkit doing any kind of calculations on options other than what price they're bought
Re:GeniusTrader, and optsys (soon) for options... (Score:2)
Sorry for the question overload, just curious.
Re:GeniusTrader, and optsys (soon) for options... (Score:2)
The data I bought from Prophet contains volume and open interest data for options. It's not completely clean, so I'm going to have to scrub some of it, and it's a bit of a pain to work with, but I'm getting there.
If you have more questions, by all mea
FURTHER INFORMATION (Score:2)
-There is no way to tell which stocks the majority of the option roots are for. This is particularly irritating, because if you can't match them, they're useless.
-Quite a few of the files are misnumbered when it comes to the year (possibly more, but I didn't look that closely once I got to the problems that it was already having). That's more trouble to figure out how to relabel thousand
Excel (Score:1)
Re:Excel (Score:1)
Open Office gives the possibilty to use a lot of powerfull databases trough an Access-like interface, without the poor limits of Access. All of this is well integrated in a Spreadsheet environment. Maybe some people have began to do interesting things with that...
Some software ideas (Score:4, Informative)
TA-Lib: Technical Analysis Library at http://ta-lib.org/
Windows and Linux technical analysis open-source software library allowing to maintain and process financial data. Provides RSI, MACD, Stochastic, moving average... plus SQL, ASCII, Yahoo! stock market data access. Works in C/C++, Perl, .NET. Source code included.
Another: http://eiffel-mas.sourceforge.net/
and one more library: http://quantlib.org/
Ask on Wilmott.com (Score:2)
Re:Ask on Wilmott.com (Score:2)
why trade? (Score:1, Interesting)
Sure, buy-and-hold does
Technical Analysis? Why not buy lottery tickets? (Score:3, Informative)
I've watched several people go broke on the gospel of technical analysis. To me, the tell-tale is that I never hear people who are into technical analysis talk about their total return, after taxes and commissions. Instead, I always hear them talk about the stocks they made money on. I happen to be privy to my father's portfolio, and using technical analysis, churning his portfolio, paying taxes, he has made 8.3% a year over the last 10 years. And he more or less does this full time since his retirement.
In the same period, I've averaged 17% APR, even allowing for the .com dive. My dad makes a killing on a few stocks, but in the long run he loses because of the stocks that he makes a little bit on, but not enough to cover his brokerage fees.
My advice is this: pick a few companies whose product you believe in. Figure out what their historical P/E is. Compensate for the fact that P/E's are going up nowadays (I usually allow 20:1 where traditional value is 14.5:1.) Then estimate -- and here's the art of it -- where their earnings are going in 3 years. If the P/E based on future earnings is less than your target P/E, buy.
Then, /ignore/ "the market". I mean it. Look at your portfolio once a month, and whatever you do don't watch CNNFN or pay attention to analysts whose main interest is to get you to churn your portfolio. Buy and hold, and pay attention only to your companies' BUSINESS, not the market.
Maybe some of you can make TA work for you. If so, more power to you. But my money's on buy-n-hold. TA isn't investing, it's trading and gambling. Doing research for more effective TA doesn't make it not random any more than reading the sports pages makes betting on sports not random. And you don't really need any software to do it, although Quicken might be nice. As far as a book, I'd recommend "Stocks for the Long Run" by Spiegel. He goes into a lot more detail than the Lynch's of the world. Also, get yourself a good book on reading balance sheets. You'll need it.
Re:Technical Analysis? Why not buy lottery tickets (Score:2)
Re:Technical Analysis? Why not buy lottery tickets (Score:2)
I must offer my congratulations! $20,000 earning 0.5% per day will have a future value of $123,493.06 at the end of one year. On the other hand, the same $20,000 earning 1% per day will result in $755,668.69. So assuming "considerably above" is around 2% to 2.5% per day, you would have an annual income between $27,548,165.84 and $164,149
No.... (Score:2)
Man, I love it when people use math. :) Until proven otherwise, let's just agree that this guy is perhaps mistaken about his overall returns. Or perhaps there just aren't very many opportunities where he can apply his winning strategy. Either way, have to wonder why he doesn't just leave his money in for a year or 10 then buy australia.
Re:Technical Analysis? Why not buy lottery tickets (Score:1)
Re:Technical Analysis? Why not buy lottery tickets (Score:2)
Technical analysis, on the other hand,
Re:Technical Analysis? Why not buy lottery tickets (Score:1)
Horse races (Score:2)
Does anyone have info on horse race analysis and where to get the data?
Re:Horse races (Score:2)
I think he had some success, but not enough to make it all worth it.
Quantum leap - probably yes... (Score:2)
I am actually more invested in real estate than stocks at this stage.
Another option is to play Lotto 649 - the odds are terrible, but you can't win if you don't play...
BTW, I'm in Canada now. Been around a bit.
Re:Quantum leap - probably yes... (Score:2)
Real estate is probably a good bet, but with Mr. Greenspan about to start raising the rates that little party is probably at an end as well. Figures, I am planning to buy a place in the next few months. With my luck that can only mean the real estate market is in for a big dive.
Actually know a couple of Afrikaners up in Toronto. Which part of that snow covered wasteland up North have you made it to?
Do-It-Yourself Financial Trading projects (Score:1)
Qtstalker (Score:1, Informative)
From the SF description: "Stock market, commodity and technical analysis charting app based on the Qt toolkit. Extendible plugin system for quotes and indicators. Portfolio, back testing, chart objects and many more features included."
Re:Qtstalker (Score:2)
I've just been trying out qtstalker for a few weeks now and I must say I'm quite impressed.
Although its look-and-feel as well as the functionality are still a bit betaish, it is already useable!
..I already did some nice trades based on analysis done with qtstalker..
However you might need a bit of experience in (the backgrounds of) technical analysis in order to use it properly..
It has a number of nice features:
- download of free (end-of-day) quotes data from yahoo et
collective2.com (Score:1)