Adrian Reid compares AmiBroker and RealTest for backtesting. AmiBroker is fast, cheap, and has strong community support. RealTest is the only affordable platform that handles multi-system backtesting and portfolio-level capital allocation well, and Reid uses both to avoid single points of failure.
What is the best backtesting software? You've probably realized by now I favor two. I favor Amibroker and I favor Realtest. I like Amibroker because I've been using it for a long time, super fast, cost efficient, and really, really powerful. And it's got a great support base. There's a lot of users out there. There's quite a few power users and there's several external, quite a few external coders that are really, really sharp and will do the job for you if you don't know how to do it in Amibroker. So I really like that aspect of it. And I really love RealTest because RealTest is the only backtesting software that really does a great job at a cost-effective price anyway of multi-system backtesting and optimizing capital allocations between systems as well as testing for individual systems on a portfolio basis. RealTest also not terribly expensive. So it's a great option and very easy to learn. My two choices for the best backtesting software, Amibroker and RealTest. I have both, I use both. If you were starting from scratch now, either of those will do the job. RealTest will probably take you further, but you're probably gonna find that you want both because as I say, I like to have redundancy in my trading. I've got multiple brokers, I've got multiple trading software, I've got multiple computers, I've got multiple data providers. I want multiple everything because I want redundancy so that my trading business is as robust and stable as possible.
