Best Platform for ad hoc Simple Statistics

June 30th, 2016, 11:11 AM

Consider:
- If the ES is down 3 days in a row, what has happened on the 4th day?
- What typically happens on the last day of the month? the quarter?
- What typically happens if the ES gaps up 10? up 20?

My question: What is the best platform for writing quickly a study to measure statistics like these? I'm thinking that as questions like the above occur to me during the day, is there a platform well-suited to doing a quick and dirty analysis in 15 minutes or so?

I'm assuming the contenders are EasyLanguage in Tradestation or Multicharts, Investor RT, and Sierra Chart.

I took a computer programming course in college and have some experience writing simple indicators in EasyLanguage, but I am by no means a developer.

All thoughts will be appreciated.

June 30th, 2016, 07:13 PM

I use NinjaTrader C# to code up my stats queries, but get the strategy to output to a csv which I can then analyze in excel. This I have found to be the quickest (<30min) way to get an answer. I'm sure the same thing could be done in Easy Language via TradeStation or MultiCharts.

I focus on using the strategy code to calculate things which are annoying to do in excel, like multi-conditional events, i.e. break IB > return to Mid > make new High. But rather than just outputting a TRUE or FALSE, I output the minute it occurs or the bar it occurs. This way I find the data has more uses once in Excel and you can get more from the same data and dive a bit deeper.

June 30th, 2016, 08:20 PM

Very easy and fast to do in Morningstar's Commodity Data Addin or Commodity Query, but unfortunately not the cheapest software around.

Code

SHOW
1: 1 day change of ES
WHEN
Close of ES 1 day ago is less than Close of ES 2 days ago
AND
Close of ES 2 days ago is less than Close of ES 3 days ago
AND
Close of ES 3 days ago is less than Close of ES 4 days ago

I've just started using Tradestation but I know you can append a csv file so that should be relatively easy to do as well.

June 30th, 2016, 10:50 PM

Laconic

Consider:
- If the ES is down 3 days in a row, what has happened on the 4th day?
- What typically happens on the last day of the month? the quarter?
- What typically happens if the ES gaps up 10? up 20?

My question: What is the best platform for writing quickly a study to measure statistics like these? I'm thinking that as questions like the above occur to me during the day, is there a platform well-suited to doing a quick and dirty analysis in 15 minutes or so?

I'm assuming the contenders are EasyLanguage in Tradestation or Multicharts, Investor RT, and Sierra Chart.

I took a computer programming course in college and have some experience writing simple indicators in EasyLanguage, but I am by no means a developer.

All thoughts will be appreciated.

Mathlab is really cheap for personal use and will do all you want and the language is really easy to learn (nothing like C). Trading platform are not meant for that even if you can dothat but it will be limited and sometime complicated due to those limitations.

Best Platform for ad hoc Simple Statistics

Discussion in Platforms and Indicators

Best Platform for ad hoc Simple Statistics