Paper Trading

[RTS TRADING]

This may have been covered already, but I did not see it in a search.
I have just looked at the 7.2 release and specifically at the Paper Trading portion.

When double clicking on a "last" or "Bid" or "Ask" price, I am able to get a popup order entry form. Perfect.
Problem.....If I have as a default a market order, then when I click Buy I expect to get the "Ask" price at the time and for Sell, I expect the "Bid" price.

No, I get the last price! This is not the real world and should be changed for "Market Order".

In fact, when double clicking "Ask" I would expect the market order to produce an immediate confirmation to BUY THE ASK?
And double clicking the "Bid", I would expect the market order to produce an immediate confirmation to SELL THE BID?

Of course, I now use "My Price" but the price does not update with changes in the quotes, so I need to click on ask or bid to determine which price and then hit the appropriate transaction button. Very poor design IMHO.

I would also like to see the account information utilized for the paper trading and summaries of all transactions, etc. detailed in a nice summary.

I believe that people need to be able to truly paper trade in realtime as if it were the real thing.

Give this area more work, please!


Thanks,
Bob

[AndyS]

Hi Bob,

Thank you for your comments. The paper trade module was originally created as a method to demo what the integrated broker idea was all about. Since it's release, we've received favorable responses to enhanced this into a feature traders can use to hone their trading skills.

This will be done on a future release. The feature list for 7.2 is already full, so it will have to wait to at least the next.

Regards,
Andy S.
eSignal Support

[Book]

Higher Priority Please

I wish you would give this high priority. I feel certain there are many more users interested in paper trading than in automated trades (only a small minority of traders are skilled coders) and it might become a major marketing point for the software. Every trader I know and trust strongly recommends months of realistic papertrading before rookies go live and not very many platforms offer this. Ensign is one exception and is a favorite of many for just that reason.

In addition to the feature list already mentioned, there some be some other user configurable parameters: market orders should execute only after some delay, perhaps 3-5 seconds. Limit orders should execute only if the market trades through your price, or at least, significant volume has traded there. These will introduce some valuable realism in the fills.

[AndyS]

Hi Book,

Thank you for your comments on the Paper Trading Module. It is a priority, but it does require to be part of a software release. This cannot be done & distributed overnight. Our next release (7.3) will be primarily about regional options along with bug fixes. Theres not going to be a whole lot of features added on this release and hopefully 7.3 will be out by end of February. While we haven't set a list of features to be added in 7.4, Paper trading module enhancements heads the current list.

Regards,
Andy

[bigtee]

As a suggestion, when you enhance the Paper Trade module, how about making it so you can paper trade off the Replay feature? That would really make a superb training tool.

bigtee

[hawk1]

Paper Trading Modul

Hi !

I have this posted 01-19-2003 in the Trading Strategies Forum, but as it seems this one is an dead one (only one reply from RTS TRADING), i have decided to post this again in this Forum.


When I started to trade, a paper trading tool in combination with real time data would have been, what i have often wished to have. But at this time it wasn't available. So I (and all other novice traders) had to go an more or less expensive way of getting practice and experience in trading.

And therefore I am convinced, that the Paper Trading Plugin is one of the most important tools in order to learn trading, develope trading strategies and getting confidence in one's trading skills and trading concepts without losing much real money! Especially in combination with the possiblity to playback and papertrade historical data.

And I am sure, that this tool gives every charting software which has it an edge to blow away its competitors (especially among the newbies). Even, if it's charting possibilities wouldn't be the state of the art (as eSignal surely is now).

And also for experienced traders it's a valueable tool for testing new trading strategies or in a losing phase to get back the confidence in his skills. Hey, I sound like an sales manager, but it' s true.

Although till now eSignal has only done the first step in order to make the paper trading tool as useful as it could and should be.

Here are my Suggestions:

- The summary should show the profit or loss of every single trade and the cumulative P/L of the trading day.

- The summary must be saveable to a file for each day and exportable into Excel in order to analyse one's trading strengths and weakness.

- There should be the possibility to playback historical data and papertrade them with different chooseable speed (e.g. normal, double, ....) for training sessions after the market has closed or on the weekend. This would be important especially for parttime traders, as the most beginners are and reduce dramatically the time to get an experienced trader.

- Paper Trading Order Entry -> update the price automatically in realtime (if the ordertype "market" is choosen) and give us the possibility to adapt the price quickly, when the other order types are choosen (eg. with the arrow keys or a drop down list with different prices in $ 0,10 steps or so).

- Broker Window -> insert a column, where the realtime price is visible.

At last let me tell you, that IMO the paper trading tool is more important to develope than the other broker plug ins. Why? Cause for every Trading Platform (IB, Cyber, etc.) there exists an trading software independent from the charting software, everyone can use additionally to eSignal to manage his trading account. But there's only one eSignal Paper Trading Tool.

Thanks,
hawk1

[mattgundersen]

Re: Reply to post 'Paper Trading'

Book,

In addition to the feature list already mentioned

I assume you mean thigns mentioned in this forum?

BTW, I like your idea for the market orders to delay execution by X seconds.

m.

--- [email protected] wrote:
> Hello mattgundersen,
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>

[mattgundersen]

Re: Reply to post 'Paper Trading'

FYI - although there aren't a lot of posts in this forum. I do monitor it as
we are going to be improving the paper trading as well as other broker support.

Make your suggestions here

m.


--- [email protected] wrote:
> Hello mattgundersen,
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>

[mattgundersen]

Deppfoo sent this to me. I'm posting it here so others can comment and add to this and I can keep a log of it. These are some good ideas.

Matt,

Hoping you can help me on this one. I have a system designed and the backtest has worked well. I know need to set up a forward test of the system.

My assumption, and correct me if this is wrong is that I need to Paper Trade to get proper real time results. If I don't need to and can just keep a chart with the Backtest open, all the better. However I think that's not going to give us an accurate sense of where we really got filled, et al.

Anyway, so here is the question. If you are triggering buys and sells (and we are allowing longs/shorts here) how do you manage that process? In strategy backtest it's easy as the system takes care of closing longs and covering automatically. Is there an easy way to set this up?

Second. Where are the results of the paper trade history stored?

I'd appreciate the help (and yes, the DLL you sent along previously solved all issues on backtest and the analyzer, big thanks for that).

[Book]

Here's an example which I always thought was a pretty good paper trade platform

http://hometown.aol.co.uk/nqtraderman/myhomepage/business.html

I have never used it myself, since I don't want to run Excel on my production trading machine during market hours, but it seemed to have a nice layout, and all the right features.

[RTS TRADING]

Here is one for IB TWS users:

https://www.futures-trader.net

Lots of extra CCI stuff, but useful compared to eSignal.

[bigtee]

Re: Reply to post 'Paper Trading'

> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>

[bigtee]

Matt, now that I figured out out to paste into this browser window (after my email reply didn't work), here are my suggestions for Paper Trade improvements. Most of these are fairly high level without a lot of detail.

I believe there are three great capabilities in eSignal that, when combined could make a tremendous learning tool (Paper Trade, Replay, Backtest Statistics Engine).

Suggestions:

1. Paper Trade module should function in the Replay mode as well as in real time. That way the program can keep track of your paper trades for you as you practice. Now you have to make a note, write them down, analyze them yourself, etc, etc.

2. Save the data until the user data decides to clear it.
Currently, once the trade is closed most of the data is gone. So you can't go back and look at what you actually did for the day/week, whatever in total. You can't relook at the individual trades to see how you could have improved them. You can't generate a significant bunch of data to see how your system really does when forward tested as opposed to backtesting. Also once the program is closed and reopened, overnight for example, all the data is gone. This makes it difficult to see how you are doing over time (several days or more) or to calculate any statistics on your system/performance. Hard to do even within one day and multiple trades.

a. So, when the trade is closed, save the data in the summary. Trade History should have the necessary data, ie. symbol, date/time of entry/exit, entry/exit price, long or short position, gain/loss etc.

b. Porftfolio gain should be cumulative and data for it and any open trades should be saved overnight.

c. In fact you could add a button or something to "Clear trade history." Another possibility is to have an option in the Preferences to save Paper Trade data for X days.

3. Have a Reports/Statistics button. You already have the stats engine in the backtester. Why not just run the engine on the paper trade history file and produce an ongoing report for that folder. As you add trades, you pull up a new report with the additional trades.

4. Allow more than one "Folder" for the Paper Trade module. For example, one for Replay mode and one for Live Mode. Some may want to practice with different systems. Allow the user to select which folder the Paper Trade data is saved to.

5. Improve the Paper Trade execution window. Add a "Sell Short" option and a "Buy to Cover" option. Maybe the program is smart enough to figure it out by itself but the user might not be. Also in the current trades report you should show if the trade currently open is a long or a short. If you are in the Replay mode, add options such as "enter on close of current bar", "enter on open of next bar", etc., just like in the backtest module.

Once again, the combination of Replay, Paper Trade and the Backtest Statistics engine would make for a tremendous learning tool.

bigtee

[hawk1]

Paper Trading - Chart Visualization

Hi Matt,

i have another suggestion for the paper trading plugin in conjunction with the linked charts

Stop or Limit Orders should be visible in the linked charts e.g. with a marker on the price axis. So you can see, if your limit or stop price is in conjunction with the resistance and support zones of the price chart.

hawk1

[RTS TRADING]

www.futures-trader.net

This program(www.futures-trader.net) has been modified and the most critical order button, account info., trading stats, orders, trade results, and futures tickers is now easily viewed.

This program does simulated trades with realtime data thru IB OR eSignal, OR real trades!

The simulator is free

Very worthwhile product IMHO.

Bob