Is Your Trading Data Accurate? Here’s How to Set Up RealTest Correctly

In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to connect your data to realtest so you can start to use the software for its intended purpose. Design and testing trading systems when you first install and open up Real Test, it's going to look something like this. But when I first opened Real Test, I looked at it and said, where are my charts? How do I start? And so in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to connect your data so you can start to see charts and start to create your scripts and do your backtesting. But before we do that, we're going to. I want to share with you the best data source for you to use with Real Test. And if you're trading stocks, absolutely, the best data source for you to use is Nor Gate Data. There's a link subscribe to Nor Gate Data if you're not already a subscriber. Nor Gate provides data for. The great thing about Nor Gate data is it's survivorship bias free. The data downloader is very high quality. The splits and adjustments are all taken care of. And the team at Nor Gate do a fantastic job of creating amazing data for you to work with so you get accurate results with your backtesting and trading. And Real Test integrates very naturally and easily with Nor Gate Data. So that's why I recommend you subscribe to Nor Gate if you want to trade markets other than the U.S. canada or Australia. The data source that I use and recommend is Meta Stock Data. Metastock has one global data subscription that gives you access to every single stock market globally. So if you want to trade markets like Hong Kong, like what I do to get additional diversification, then Meta Stock Data is the right one to use. Click the Meta Stock link below to subscribe to Meta Stock Data so you can link it up to your Real Test and get started on those markets. All right, so how do we link up Real Test to our Nor Gate data? We come back into Real Test. So I've got a blank script open here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with an import section. And so we just type the word import with a column. Now when we're defining imports, there's a couple of things we need to do. The first one is Data Source. As soon as you start typing, you'll notice that this little drop down menu pops up and allows you to select the function that you want. And the great thing about that is you don't have to know the exact function name as long as you start to type it you can usually select it from the drop down list. So we want data source. So we just hit enter. I'm going to hit a tab to keep it neat. And. And the data source I want to use is Nor Gate. And again if you just start typing Nor gate you'll see it there. Once we've got the data source, we need to tell it what data to actually include from the Nor Gate database. So I'm going to have an include list. So you can see include list comes up here. We can select that and hit enter. So if we want to use a predefined watch list from within Nor Gate, all we need to do is hit the full stop and then all of the the predefined watch list in Nor gate will come up and you can also select your own set up your own watch lists in Nor gate as well. So let's imagine we want to look at the NASDAQ 100. If you're back testing, you would want the current and past NASDAQ 100. Let's go with the current and past for now. So I select that if you want to include some indices in your data that you're downloading so you can refer to the indices in your trading system, you'll also want to add those at this point as well. So, so I'm going to add another include statement here. Let's hit enter. And then what I'm going to do is type the symbol, the ticker for the NASDAQ 100 stock index. So we can include that. Then we also need to include the start date and the end date. So I'll type start date and let's make it from 1st of January 1995 and end date. And let's make that latest. Latest means your database would include all data. If you wanted to use a or to force yourself to only use a in sample period of data, then you might put latest to a certain date. Like for example, if you want to design your system on 1995 to 2018, you might put end date as first of January 2018 and then you could make sure that you don't cheat and look at the later data when you're designing your system. So you've got some out of sample data held aside if you want to use it for trading. Obviously you're going to have to have your end date as latest. So you've got all of the latest data in your database. Hey, if you're finding this video helpful and you want to go deeper with real test, I've put together A complete free program called Real Test Launchpad. The best part is it's completely free and you get lifetime access. So all you need to do is click the link in the description below and register to get access to RealTest Launchpad now. So if you want to learn Real Test fast and get up and running with confidence in the next couple of days, click the link in the description below and get access to Real Test Launchpad. You can just pause this video, click the link, get registered, and then come back. You'll get instant access to over 30 different tutorial lessons showing you how to do all of the important functions in Real Test. So click the link below and I'll see you on the inside. Now, back to the video. So the last thing we want to do is give it a name so that we can refer to this Real Test data file and load it up in subsequent trading sessions. So let's start typing Save as, and I'll just call this one NASDAQ 100 current and past. And for a data file, it's got to end in a rtd. And then we can just save this. You can give this script, this is the script to load the data file as distinct from the data file. You can give this script whatever name you want. I've just saved this as NASDAQ 100 current and passed RTS. All it's got in there is the data import. It doesn't have any system or any exploration or any chart or anything like that at all this point. So I'll save that. Okay, so now we have completed our import. We can apply that and I can press the import button. The import button is going to pull all of that data from Nor Gate into Real Test so you can start to use it, loading it all into memory. It's going to give you access to that data. So we're going to be able to look at it on charts and so on. That takes a couple of seconds, depending on how much data it is. It's already done for the NASDAQ 100 current and past, so it's complete. So now what we can do is go and look at some charts and I'm going to show you how to do the charting in the next video. So if you're like me and you're going to want to trade multiple different markets and different sectors or different indices or different types of stocks within that market, you're going to want to create real test data files for each of those different markets or market segments that you want to trade. Typically, you're going to be able to use the built in watchlists from Nor Gate in order to build those data files. But if you don't have a Nor Gate built in watchlist for a data file that you want, what you're going to do is open up the Nor Gate Data Updater and then you're going to come into the Watchlist library and you're going to create your own dynamic watch list you don't want to create. It's always up to date. So you can click on that and you can go through the stock market, you can select all of the different, all of the different parameters or filters that you want for your watch list, give it a name, save it, and then you'll be able to access that watch list from within Real Test in order to do your backtesting and your charting and so on. But for now, let's go back to Real Test and I'll show you that you can see that data now that we've imported it in into the program. Okay, so what we're going to do is just click on the Charts tab here and you'll see that I've got the NASDAQ 100 index. And if I click on that, you can zoom in and out on the chart and see the NASDAQ 100 index. We can select any of the tickers that we've imported and show them on the chart. So here, if I just type AAPL for Apple and click Chart, it's going to show a chart of Apple and we can start to look at that. I'll talk about charting in more detail in a later lesson in this course, but for now, that's how you input data into Real Test. It's the first step for any of your analysis. So make sure you've got your Nor Gate data. Click the link below, subscribe to Nor Gate if you haven't already. And then as soon as you've done that, you can start accessing your Nor Gate data from within RealTest. That's all for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now. Sam.