Adrian Reid walks through AmiBroker, a backtesting platform built for systematic stock traders. It tests strategies across multiple stocks at once, costs less than competitors, and uses a scripting language called AFL that works like advanced Excel formulas. Reid has used it for years and says even non-programmers can build simple strategies with it.
AmiBroker backtesting. AmiBroker backtesting is probably one of the fastest and most powerful approaches to backtesting in the market. So the software is called AmiBroker. It's not, as the name suggests, a broker. It's just trading software. So that's a little bit misleading, but it's very powerful trading software that does portfolio-style backtesting. Portfolio-style backtesting is where you backtest a portfolio system as in, You might have a stock trading system that holds up to 20 or 30 different stocks in the portfolio at any one time. And the rules of the system manage the entries and the exits and the position sizing of all of those different stocks. Portfolio backtesting is absolutely essential if you wanna systematically trade in stocks because you typically don't wanna trade a system on an individual stock ticker. You wanna trade a system on a portfolio of stocks. Now, what are the advantages of AmiBroker? First of all, it's cheap. It's only a couple hundred bucks. So it's very affordable to get into. You also get a free trial, which is pretty fully featured. So you can get a sense for how the software works. AmiBroker is also very, very fast. It's quite well programmed. So the backtests run extremely quickly. So do the optimizations. The coding language is AmiBroker's own in-house coding language. It's called AmiBroker Formula Language, AFL. It's moderately easy to learn. It's not the easiest coding language I've ever seen, but as long as you keep your systems fairly simple, which you should, it's pretty straightforward. It's kind of like writing fancy Excel formulas and you just string them together with logic statements and references between the formulas. So AmiBroker formula language is pretty easy to learn. I'm not a coder by any stretch of the imagination. The only reason I code is because I need to code for my systematic trading. So I'm a trader first, coder second, and I can manage with AmiBroker. I've been using AmiBroker for quite a few years. It's a really powerful tool.
