A few months ago I switched the help file from PDF format to CHM. These CHM files are the standard "help" format for Microsoft windows, having replaced the HLP format.

Anyway, a couple of people reported having problems opening the CHM file. Or they could open it, and see the index on the left, but the pages would not display.

This seems to be because of Microsoft's new security measures. You know - the ones that ask you to confirm before it does absolutely anything.

So on the Download page, there is now a new section which will help you out if you're in that situation.

In short, I've finished the coding and am testing it now. I've tested that everything adds/edits/deletes, and that doing so through the new wizards produces the same results as the corresponding windows. That kind of thing is looking solid.

Next is ensuring that backtesting still spits out the correct results. And trying out the new backtesting functionality which lets you click a button and it puts all the indicators you used, and entry and exit points on the chart.

After that is testing auto-trading, which is fairly important :-)

Sorry for the delay. I was working on this really solidly for a while there and needed a bit of a break. But it's again become a habit to sit down and work on this. I was in the habit of sitting down and letting the Internet take me on learning (procrastinating?) adventures. E.g. how to make a sponge cake --> how to make various other cakes --> cooking in general --> edible balcony garden --> Autopot --> permaculture. That chain took quite a few days to finish. There were many others. So many websites. So many Youtube videos :-)

Hi. It's been a while. In fact I was actually trying to make this website look dead. I'll explain why...

TS is being held back by the brokers it currently connects with. Not the number (two), but by the brokers themselves. Gain Capital and Oanda.

I allow auto trading only in Gain Capital demo accounts, because there was no way I could test trading in live accounts without risking real money. Testing is normally what demo accounts are for, but talk in their forums made it out that there are differences between the demo and live accounts. Not good.

One of the chiefs at Gain Capital has told me this is untrue, and asked that I reconsider. And I might in the future.

Oanda has the obvious stumbling block of needing to pay $600 per month for their API. Which is fine if you already have the trading system and the volume. But not good for starting out. Or if you want to take a holiday or something.

So I was looking at Interactive Brokers (IB), EFX Group, and/or MB Trading. Their APIs are free, and apparently good. (BTW, if you didn't know, recently EFX Group and MB Trading became one and the same).

As a side note, in the not-too-distant future I'd like TS to work with shares as well.

As it happens, Medved Quotetracker allows connections to IB, MB, and a bunch of share-trading places. Yay. All I have to do is hook into Quotetracker and a lot of problems are solved at once.

And I was all ready to do that. But then...

I've been approached many times by people who want to go into partnerships. Generally people who want to market my software. Nothing ever got past a couple of emails back and forth.

Until... a bigwig at a forex brokerage stumbled across my site. This time things got serious. A lot of effort was put into the wording of a contract. I signed the contract. I was given a contract-signing fee. Instead of doing the Quotetracker stuff, I was spending all my free time putting in the features that this forex brokerage requested. (Did I say all of my free time? I meant ALL of my free time! :-). And then... it all fell apart.

The deal was that the company would pay me, and then provide the software for free to all of their customers. But exclusively, meaning I could no longer make it available for other forex companies (which at that time and still now is Gain Capital and Oanda). Existing customers could continue to use the old version, but were not going to be given upgrades. So they'd still be able to use what they'd paid for, but that would be that. At least that's how I remember the deal.

So... my integrity told me that I should not try to get new customers. Because it would not be good, in my way of thinking at least, to espouse a product, get people to sign up (which for some entails buying the $600 Oanda API), and then a month later say "oh yeah, you're on your own". BTW, back then I was under strict instruction not to make any of this public, so the option of just telling people what was going on was not available.

And that is why I have not posted for a long time, and tried to make this site look dead, and removed the 12 month plans from the purchase page. Yeah, it was a crazy situation to be in.

But you still came and signed up! Didn't you! DIDN'T YOU! :-) Every couple of weeks or so, someone would write a forum entry which would bring a bunch of new members and new sign-ups.

Anyway, now that TS is no longer under contract, please keep writing forum entries and signing up :-)


Where to from here?

Well, the coding for v2.0.0 is almost finished. Then comes testing. And then comes release. And v2.0.0 contains most of the things that the forex brokerage requested. There's a whole bucket load of stuff, but the major points are:

• Wizards. A lot of people had trouble getting set up initially, and it's hoped these Wizards will now make everything much easier.
• Backtesting results no longer print out to Excel files. In fact there is no reliance on Excel nor CSV files at all. The results are instead saved to the database, and you get a pretty equity curve chart.
• After backtesting, you can click a button and TS will fill in a chart with all the indicators that you used in the trading system, and show you where all the entries and exits were.
• You can have more than one chart window open.
• You can import/export trading systems and alerts. For backup and sharing. And if you want to sell your system but don't want others to know how it works, you can encrypt it if you want. Encrypted systems will still backtest/auto-trade on other peoples' machines, but they won't be able to see or change any of the rules. Not even if they peek in the database.
• Auto-trading is now kicked off by new prices coming in, not from a timer.
• Removed the Help sections from individual windows, and the separate PDF document, and now use a standard Windows help file.
• It looks a cooler than before :-)

Pretty much all I have left to code is repeat everything for the Indicator-based Alerts that I've already done for Trading Systems.

Then once v2.0.0 is out, v2.0.1 is going to be a bug-fix and documentation release (because with all the changes now the documentation is a lot different in some places to how the program works). And then I go back to Medved Quotetracker.

So yeah, I'm still around, TS is still being worked on (feverishly), and that's why stuff happened like it did.

The problem with TS at the moment is that it works with just two forex brokers, and neither are perfect.

It works with Gain Capital, but only Gain Capital demo accounts. Gain Capital allows API use for free, you see, so it's a good starting point. You can experiment for as long as you like until you find a system or systems which prove themselves to be profitable.

But for the reasons listed on the Gain Capital Quirks page, I have not made TS available for use in their live accounts. (One of their VPs got in contact with me a while ago and asked that I reconsider. No guarantees, but I might take another look sometime next year).

So once you've found your profitable trading systems, the only choice TS gives you at the moment is to use Oanda. And Oanda's API fee is really big. Really, very big. $600 to get your hands on it, and then $600 per month after that (discounted for usage though).

It's fairly prohibitive for people just starting out.

So TS connects to one free broker good for starting out, and one expensive broker which is fine if you have some money behind you. What TS really needs, is to connect to a broker or brokers who offer free API usage, and I would consider trustworthy and stable enough to let TS trade in their live accounts.

And I've said for a while now I am going to use Medved Quotetracker to connect to EFX Group, MB Trading, and Interactive Brokers. It's been in the Installation, Upgrading, Removal Guide for quite a few months.

What I'd like to tell you now is that I will have finished the connection to at least one of these brokers in very early 2008.

So, if you can hang back for a couple of months, perhaps test your system with Gain Capital until then, there should be no need to buy the Oanda API. Unless you really want to. That's your choice of course. For everyone else though, get excited about early next year.

Unfortunately I rarely hear from customers once they are up and running. So I have no idea if they are using TS in live accounts, and if so if they are profitable or not. So I took the opportunity to ask a customer the other day how he was going. Here's the reply:

It is all going well. I am trading live and it's running on the server with no intervention at all. Spent some time in Turkey and didn't have to check anything.

I do the maintenance manually once a month or so and give it all a restart.

The combined systems are profitable. The live results mirror the backtest so far - so I am happy.

It's possible folks.

With the User Manual out of the way, and a bunch of other things on the ol' TO DO list ticked off, I finally got back to coding TS.

This release has just a couple of minor things done to it, just to get me back into the swing of things. I was a bit rusty on packaging everything up, so if you have a problem with the download or install, please contact me.

Part of this release was fixing a bug "date/time field value out of range" when loading price data from files, which might have occurred on machines where the locale is not US or Japan. Surely this bug has been around since the dawn of time, so I'm surprised nobody told me about it. Don't be shy in telling me about bugs you find :-)

The Change Log has more details of the other things done. You can download TS on the Download page. And then everybody rush to the Purchase page.

I was going through my website logs the other day. Anyone with a website can see "referrals" - the addresses of other websites which have a link to their own (assuming somebody has clicked that link).

So I sometimes go to those other websites and see what's written. (Interestingly there are a lot of sites in Spanish and German linking to my theory articles).

Anyway, one guy has some automated trading software for sale. Someone asked him "if it works, why would you sell it?". In the course of answering that guy, he linked to me.

But isn't it funny that that kind of question prevails? I've touched on this a couple of times before, but why are traders the only ones who aren't allowed to want to make more money? Aren't we exactly the type of person who is inclined to make money any way we can?

That kind of question also shows a misunderstanding of how trading works. It's not a fixed income. There are good times. And then there are lean times. Traders are people, believe it or not, and tend have things like families, rent to pay, food to buy. If done well, trading can bring in a fantastic income. But the need for security, the need to be a good *consistent* provider for your family (or just for yourself), doesn't go away.

And then, there is the fact that we live in a capitalistic society. Consider a movie star who spends a couple of months doing some 'acting', and gets a $20 million payment. Why is it, that the actor then goes on to make another movie? Why is it, that the actor then goes on to make a car commercial? Don't they have "enough" money? In capitalism, there is not such a concept.

Even if we don't use the money for ourselves, we can always use the extra for the benefit of others. Ala Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and a list of other millionaire/billionaire philanthropists. How are they best to serve humanity - by volunteering their time at a soup kitchen for the homeless for 365 days a year? Or instead earning a stack of money, building a number of soup kitchens, and employing people to run all those soup kitchens?

And so, just like any other normal person, traders want to make more money. Selling their trading knowledge, or trading tools they've made along the way, seems a good way to me to pick up some extra cash. It's a completely normal thing to do, but yet people still have it in their head that once you've got a killer trading system, you are then no longer allowed to want to make money through alternate means.

Further, you're probably aware of the saying "it takes money to make money". Let's say you found a trading system which brings in 100% per year. Now let's say you have only $2000 to trade with. $2000 x 100% equals another $2000. You can't live on $2000.

Year 1: $2000 x 100% = $4000.
Year 2: $4000 x 100% = $8000.
Year 3: $8000 x 100% = $16000.
Year 4: $16000 x 100% = $32000.
Year 5: $32000 x 100% = $64000.
Year 6: $64000 x 100% = $128000.

You could probably live on $32000 per year. So if you start with $2000, and you consistently make 100% return per year, it's going to be about 5 years before you can quit your day job.

Two problems come to mind: (1) you need to consistently earn 100% p.a. for this plan to work; and (2) once you've quit your day job, you now have to consistently earn 100% p.a. until you die. Because all of your winnings would be taken up by buying daily essentials. You wouldn't be saving any money - you'd be treading water for the rest of your life.

What I'm trying to say is, you need a decent bank balance before you can consider trading for a living. The more you have, the less return per annum you need to pay for daily essentials.

So, I sell my freaking software! :-)

The other fundamental misunderstanding of how trading works, shown by the question of "if it works, why would you sell it?" is this theory of "the more people know the system, the less well it works". Now in my particular software, you create your own trading system. So you won't be trading the same as me - I'm just providing you a way to automate your own system. However, even if I was selling trading systems, theoretically the more people that know the system - the better the results should be for everybody. No?

Because, the more people buying at a particular time, the more demand there is. And the more demand there is, the higher the price goes. Isn't that how the supply-demand thing works??

So to me, the question should not be "if it works, why would you sell it?". The question should be "if it works, why wouldn't you sell it?".

A good friend of mine whom I've never met - Trader Eyal - has quit what most would consider quite a "good" job in Singapore, and is on his way to live in Thailand and trade stocks for a living.

Trading for a living, and the freedom that entails, is the ultimate goal for me, and I'm sure just about anyone reading this blog.

The problem is that too many of us attempt it with too little experience, and too little funds. Our returns then have to be ridiculously high just to pay for the daily essentials, which can't last. The money runs out, and we head back to work feeling miserable at the old constraints of working for a company, and perhaps never attempt to live the dream again.

But Trader Eyal has some years of experience. Moreover some years of profitable experience. And I'm sure he has the funds behind him to make a go of it. Moving to Thailand will also surely reduce the costs, assuming he doesn't go crazy in the way some foreigners do when they live in Thailand. Hear that Eyal? Stay clear of the man-girls :-) Good luck!

Whoa, one month since I posted anything. Time flies. I moved house. Bought a car. Stopped drinking alcohol and properly started losing weight.

But the big news is, there is an addition to the Thinking Stuff family. Most likely. In terms of it's not just a one-man-band anymore. Probably.

One of my co-workers is most likely going to help me out with some of the coding. We're still in the process of working out the specifics. But here's hoping.

Before you could only buy Backtesting as a yearly subscription.  But, I'm pleased to announce that you can now buy monthly Backtesting subscriptions for just $20.  If you use TS properly, you'll be using $20 bills as tissues pretty soon, so jump on board :-)