Financial Trading Software?

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?"

Comments

Re:ETF Timing

[afabbro]

Slight correction: ETFs are Exchange Traded Funds, which are a basket of stocks put together as a sort of mini-index. You can buy them through nearly any brokerage.

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.

GeniusTrader, and optsys (soon) for options...

[Stile 65]

I'm glad I saw this thread.

First, check out GeniusTrader, 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, 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.