Free Data Feeds Built Into Your Broker

TradeStation is a big name in the industry, and it's a combination of both a broker and a backtesting or trading software. And so this combination is really neat because the broker provides you the data that feeds into TradeStation software for your analysis and backtesting, which is fantastic because it means you don't have to pay extra for all of the data feeds. So if you're a futures trader, TradeStation is a really good choice. The trouble is the TradeStation backtesting software, frankly, is a bit of a dog. It's 32-bit software, it's old, it's slow, and it needs a complete revamp. The own, yeah, I would say the main advantage of TradeStation is you get the data straight from the broker for free. It's all integrated. And once you've coded a system in TradeStation, it's automatically ready to automate in the TradeStation brokerage. And that's a really good advantage. You don't have to do anything extra to automate when you're using TradeStation. but there's a couple of big downsides apart from the fact that it's a slow old dog. It's 32-bit software. The optimization is hellishly slow compared to AmiBroker and RealTest. Frankly, I just would never even optimize a system in TradeStation. It's too slow. AmiBroker is about 15, 20 times faster, and RealTest is faster again. But the other problem with TradeStation is it's a single instrument backtester. It cannot backtest portfolio systems. So you're limited to certain types of systems. Now, most TradeStation users, to be fair, are probably futures algo traders, and futures algo traders tend to trade single instrument systems. So one system trades one ticker. So if that's what you trade, TradeStation is okay. But if you wanna trade a portfolio system where the system holds multiple stocks simultaneously, TradeStation won't cut it. So that's a serious drawback in my world.