Your SOFTWARE contains an advanced System Testing capability.
The software permits use of plain language to construct trading systems that can be tested on any of the markets covered by Your SOFTWARE, over any time period, for performance and profitability.
The principle objective of System Testing is educational - to demonstrate what results will be produced by using particular trading techniques, and to dynamically assess various trading strategies’ ability to detect and exploit price movements in a large range of data, over user-defined periods of time.
The System Testing function is designed to allow users to set up trading systems and then hypothetically trade on a particular market or group of stocks, over a predefined range of historical price data.
By running their hypothetical trading strategies, users can see what results a particular strategy would have had in the past, and view the actual price movements on the price chart of each detected trade.
System Testing uses historical data in its operation and by definition its action is retrospective. The system tester is not a forecasting tool, rather a back tester of particular trading strategies. Once users have analyzed the result of their hypothetical trading systems run in system testing, they may later have sufficient confidence in their trading strategies to employ them when making actual trades.
The user can utilize combinations of entry and exit triggers as well as trading stops to build their own systems, these can be as detailed or as simple as required.
Using the System Builder and Your SOFTWARE's plain language interface, the user puts together a set of trade scan-based parameters and trading rules and then selects a market, quote list or set of scan results on which to test the system. Various stops including stop-losses and take profit stops can be built in and a starting capital base is nominated.
The result is a realistic Trading System - a set of trading rules that can be consistently applied to a market or group of securities with predictable results.
Trading Systems are built and configured on the System Criteria page of the System Testing interface.
System Tests run individual Trading Systems in particular markets or groups of securities over set periods of time. The software will make hypothetical trade entries and exits, and calculate and account for profits or losses, based on the various parameters and trading rules over the entire period nominated in the setup.
The test results are shown on the Trade Listing page of the interface.
For more details go to the System Testing Work Flow topic.
The first step in system testing is to create or select a Trading System.
Trading Systems are created in the System Builder interface on the System Criteria tabbed page.
Click the New Trading System command in the Systems Tool bar menu to begin the process:
The System Builder work page will open with a blank System Criteria work page displayed.
For more information, go to the System Builder help topic.
When the criteria has been defined the new Trading System can be saved for reuse, using the Save Trading System as... dialog box,
Each Trading System is saved as an individual file with the .tds file extension.
Click the Open Trading System command in the Systems Tool bar menu to begin the process:
The Select a file... dialog box will open:
All previously saved Trading Systems are saved with the .tds file extension.
The default location for saving and retrieving these file types is the Trading Systems folder in Your SOFTWARE's program directory.
The navigation, display and file management tools located in the top right are the same as for other Windows file selector dialog. For more information on this functionality, go to the File Selector topic in the Shared Utilities section of this Help.
Once open, the Trading System's System Test can be run by clicking the Start button:
Alternatively, the trading system criteria or scope can be altered and the new System Test run.
The changes can be saved, over-writing the existing .tds file, or it can be Saved as... a new .tds file.