(Note: This is the first post in a series about using Amibroker for creating and trading strategies.)
Amibroker is a tool I’ve been using for backtesting for at least 15 years.
It’s a powerful tool for backtesting, real-time charting, and trading.
It works well with Trade-Ideas (more on that later) and other tools.
But it can be overwhelming when you first start using it.
It’s useful to think about using Amibroker in two phases:
- Backtesting
- Real-Time Trading
You should start with backtesting – that will be cheaper to get data and you minimize the technical hurdles required to move your trading needle.
The idea is that once you get a strategy you’re confident in, then you can take the next step of using real-time data in Amibroker, which will add some complexity that you can ignore for now.
Why would you want to use Amibroker?
- You have ideas to test that would benefit from a longer backtesting window than is available in Trade-Ideas
- You want to backtest on daily and intraday data, which rules out RealTest
- You want to backtest across all stocks, which rules out almost every other backtesting software out there
- You want to be able to add custom columns to your backtest for use in the Strategy Cruncher
- You want a completely customizable charting platform that runs locally (Amibroker’s charting is way underrated)
For now, focus on backtesting and creating your strategy.
Once you create your strategy with a fantastic equity curve, you’ll have plenty of motivation to progress to using Amibroker with real-time data.
Tomorrow, we’ll focus on the very first step: creating your database in Amibroker.
-Dave
P.S. Are you interested in using Amibroker for backtesting? I’m putting the final touches on a course on Amibroker that shows how traders who actually trade for their income use it. Click here to sign up to be notified when it’s available:
