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Hi all, I'm new like Elite member, buy today. I think Elite is a good solution to allow forums like this to live.
I'm here because I'm thinking about Build Alpha. I check GSB (complicated), Adaptrade (no decent strategies found and big difference about sw result and mc results...), now I'm looking on BA.
I would like to ask users here more details after more months of using this software because I'm attracted from type of setups it works on (similar to mine) but I see different opinions about. Could you write here some upgrated reviews ?
I suggest carefully reading the previous comments on this thread … there is some really good feedback, though I wish to clear up a few points raised by Mabi in September 2020:
1. You are not limited to making daily strategies. The timeframe is completely up to the user. For example, you can import minute, hourly, daily data … whatever you want. I have also done a bit with range bars.
2. Personally, I believe that the user’s workflow is critical to success in terms of minimising curve-fitting and the building of robust strategies.
3. My tip here is to add the key strategies for further development to the portfolio tool. Here, you can further develop and much more easily compare the strategies that made it past the first cut.
4. The strategies the user develops are theirs in open code. You only need to click one button and you can generate the strategy code in the blink of an eye for TradeStation, MultiCharts, MetaTrader, Python, etc. In fact, other than opening the software, this is the easiest step to copy the open code.
A few final comments from my experience in using Build Alpha:
- Remember, this product is a tool. Your success/failure can be heavily dependent on how you use the tool.
- There are many private videos with the software license and plenty of public videos on the BA YouTube site. You should consider carefully watching these many times to build your own personalised workflow to suit your own style of working because there are so many ways of approaching this.
Also, I am currently doing the beta testing on a Build Alpha training course which I think will be quite valuable in extracting more value out of the product. Though, it may be a while before it is released to the public. The third-party trainer has other courses available for algo trading, so I figure I need to be careful with the FIO rules relating to vendor promotions and what I say here. I will also take the opportunity to say that I AM NOT affiliated with the trainer or the vendor of the Build Alpha software, just a user.
I wish you well with your algo development and trading.
For what it's worth, I bought a copy of Build Alpha couple of weeks ago. I just got to working with it today, so no real feedback as yet. I am not terribly computer smart, so at this stage I am trying to figure out how to start, how it interacts with other software (TradeStation and MultiCharts) and other pretty basic things.
One question to those who are familiar with it. Along with the setup program there are other plugins. In his email David said: "if you have TS or MC download these files". When you test strategies in Build Alpha, does it give you the visual representation in TS or MC? I mean the usual buy, sell, exit arrows on the chart?
Well, it's been couple of months since I started using Build Alpha, and I feel I am familiar enough with it to make a couple of comments.
Overall this is a very useful software. You can select as many signals as you want. So if you want to test breakouts only you can do that. Breakouts with a filter - no problem. Alternatively you can select crapload of various signals, and the software will look for a combination that produces results according to your fitness test. You can slect random 500 or 1000 signals, for both entries and exits. Stop loss, profit taking as the multiple of 20 ATR. Highest high or lowest low for profit exits or stop losses. You can set up the optimization parameters on whatever is optimizable. Oh yeah, you can only test long or short side.
Earlier in the thread couple of posters complained that OOS results are not so great. No shit, really. This is the whole point of the system development, isn't it - to find the system that looks good on OOS, and 99% of ideas don't work or work on past data only. What BA does is to make the process of going through ideas faster. The results are displayed as the table, and while you are scrolling down the strategies you can bring up a small window that shows the equity curve. The way I do it - select OOS equity curve, and if I like it I switch to IS or ALL. If I like that I can then go through various robustness tests, which is the next feature of BA.
Lots of tests and metrics to make sure the strategy is robust. Most basic - the the cluster of strategies. I believe variance testing is unique to BA. It runs the strategy through 1000 iterations and gives you probabilities of a ruin and making money. If you like a strategy you can re-optimize it or re-run with extra signals. You can see the chart, you can bring up the list of trades.
Finally, you can generate codes in NT8, EL, MT4, Python or PRT (no idea what it is). Transferring the code is not straightforward, as there are some custom functions that come with BA and which you import to your program during installation. You have to set up the data in a certain way, which is not hard. Alternatively, you can change the code. For example, the code uses a custom function to estimate the number of lots for forex trading. Instead you can bracket out the function and have it as the input of fixed number.
This is a very general overview, and there are more features in the package. It lets you torture the strategy in many different ways, so if it survives all of it I think you can be confident to run it live.
Support is good. As mentioned above David answers emails very quickly. User manual is somewhat brief, but it covers all you need. Plenty of instructional videos as well, you get access to them when you download the software.
To those thinking about it - don't listen to the negative reviews in this thread. This software is not miraculous, and you have to do a lot of work to find something workable. No, I am not "one of the shills" hired to promote the software. I understand the frustration in regards to the lack of demo version, but then again, David probably has his reasons for that. One I can think of - it takes a while to learn how to use it.
In regards to pricing, same as above, the price is between the vendor and the purchaser. I contacted David about the price in 2020 and eventually bought BA in November 2021, and the price was the same as quoted a year an a half earlier.
No 30 day trail or monthly lease spells bad news for any trading software from my experience . it cost around 1500 , the price is sequestered as long as possible , another red flag . The way they do business is not good even if the software and support are . to many red flags including questionable reviews . I would not buy any software I can not try for 30 days or lease for 30 days .
I have been using Build Alpha now for multiple months and have no connection to the developer. I did encounter a few bugs which David already had solutions for when I contacted him. I would agree with previous posts that David is great with support. He normally responds within minutes to any email I send so my issues were resolved quickly. Like previous people have said, this software is a tool. If your expectation is to buy software that builds you the holy grail trading strategy, then don't buy it. I would say that it is a tool that can help you build profitable strategies that will work for a while with current markets.
I would say that diversification is the key. My advice is to use BA to build 10 strategies that are currently profitable and trade them simultaneously. Do this in simulation for a few months first to make sure all is good!! Eventually as market conditions change you will have some strategies that become un-profitable. At that point you pull them out and add a few new ones. I also don't trade anything without a stop loss that is ordered with the broker on my strategies. I use TradeStation and always worry that my PC might crash, or my internet goes down when I am not home when the market goes against me, and my strategy is unable to exit the trade.
I was new to easy language when I bought BA and the code it produced has helped me greatly to learn. The ways you can set Build Alpha up are unlimited so the results I get are totally based on the setup I use. I have also found that certain setups work better depending on what I am trading. It takes a GREAT DEAL of experimentation. I played with BA for months before even doing a simulation in TradeStation. Don't ask me the setups I use because I won't tell you!! At the end of the day this is a zero-sum game and we are all trading against each other, so I am out to take your money and not about to offer up how I do it.
One other thing to note is that when I first bought BA, I had a fairly old and slow computer. After setup, BA tries thousands of indicators and parameters against marked history and this hammers on the computer CPU so it took forever to start getting good results. I ended up buying a new PC with the latest and fastest i9 processor with fast gaming RAM and it made a huge difference.
