Intraday Trading Strategy

[damianoakley]

Hi All

Apologies in advance for this being a long post - I hope there are people out there who'll read it to the end!

I wonder if anyone could give me some advice on the Tradestation trading software by Omega Systems.

I currently own a copy of Supercharts 4, which was obviously Omega Research's trading software of the moment before the mighty Tradestation came along. I've used Supercharts to write and test my own End-of-Day trading systems in the past.

I'm now developing an intraday trading system that will trade the U.S. Stockmarket, making around 5 trades per day trading high-volume stocks. I plan to write and backtest this strategy using Tradestation. Most importantly, once the system is fully tested, I plan to automate the whole strategy and basically leave Tradestation to trade for me unattended each day.

The main things I need to know before shelling out on Tradestation are:


- is the software web-based - or do you get your own copy of it on CD?

- how much does it all cost?

- how stable is Tradestation? Can you realistically trust it to trade your strategy reliably during the day completely unnattended?

- does Tradestation allow you to position size? THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT - in other words, if I wanted to risk, say, 3% of my total capital on each trade, is Tradestation clever enough to work out exactly how many shares to buy.

I ask the last point because in Supercharts when you backtest systems, it assumes that you'll be buying 1 contract or share on every trade. Obviously, if you're risking a set percentage of your capital, one trade could be 1000 shares, the other could be 300 shares, depending on the price of the stock.

I hope all this makes sense and I would be very grateful to anyone who can help me with the above enquiries.

Many Thanks,

Damian

 

[Trader333]

Hi Damian,

Q1) - is the software web-based - or do you get your own copy of it on CD?

A1) Totally web based from what I understand so any backtesting would have to be done online

Q2) - how much does it all cost?

A2) I think it is around $200 per month plus the options you want so add exchange fees etc but you should be able to check this on their website here:
http://www.tradestation.com/fees/subscription_op.shtm


Q3) - how stable is Tradestation? Can you realistically trust it to trade your strategy reliably during the day completely unnattended?

A3) People I know who have used it have found it to be fine but there are other issues such as what if your internet connection goes down or there is a power cut and TS7 has jst placed a trade ? How would you know and how would you ensure that the trade is closed ?
It is just not good trading sense to rely on the totality of technical reliability if you want to trade intra-day in my view

Q4) - does Tradestation allow you to position size?

A4) I dont know, why not drop them an email and ask them ?

I have used TS2000i and by code writing you could put position size in. The other big advantage of TS2000i is that you can get it quite cheaply now and you can download intra-day data FOC, write your own studies and backtest them.

Personally I would never trust any system to trade for me without me being present, if you do I would consider it a very high risk approach.

Cheers


Paul