Using Amibroker - First Steps
By Dave Mabe
(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: