Below is a list of articles that contain free EasyLanguage source code to help you discover new ways to build profitable trading systems. These articles contain trading ideas that might be be the seeds of a great trading system. These are not complete trading systems as they stand. Programs like Tradestation are expensibe bells and whistles that provide no edge to anybody. If I can get the same functionality with $199 one time fee why wasting time with them? The problem with system trading is that retail traders cannot compete in HFT domain and in slower intraday and swing/position trading domain traditional backtesting is worthless or in the best case an adventure that requires a lot of luck.
Duration measures how long it takes, in years, for an investor to be repaid the bond’s price by the bond’s total cash flows. At the same time, duration is a portfolio's price to changes in interest rates.
In general, the higher the duration, the more a bond's price will drop as interest rates rise (and the greater the interest rate risk). As a general rule, for every 1% change in interest rates (increase or decrease), a bond’s price will change approximately 1% in the opposite direction, for every year of duration. If a bond has a duration of five years and interest rates increase 1%, the bond’s price will drop by approximately 5% (1% X 5 years). Likewise, if interest rates fall by 1%, the same bond’s price will increase by about 5% (1% X 5 years). Time to maturity. The longer the, the higher the duration, and the greater the interest rate risk. Consider two bonds that each yield 5% and cost $1,000, but have different maturities.
A bond that matures faster – say, in one year – would repay its true cost faster than a bond that matures in 10 years. Consequently, the shorter-maturity bond would have a lower duration and less risk. Coupon rate. A bond’s is a key factor in calculation duration. If we have two bonds that are identical with the exception on their coupon rates, the bond with the higher coupon rate will pay back its original costs faster than the bond with a lower yield. The higher the coupon rate, the lower the duration, and the lower the interest rate risk. Duration, in general, measures a bond's or fixed income portfolio's price sensitivity to interest rate changes.
Macaulay duration estimates how many years it will take for an investor to be repaid the bond’s price by the its total cash flows, and should not be confused with its maturity. Modified duration measures the price change in a bond given a 1% change in interest rates. A fixed income portfolio's duration is computed as the weighted average of individual bond durations held in the portfolio.Macaulay Duration. In the financial press, you may have heard investors and analysts discuss long-duration or short-duration strategies, which can be confusing. In a trading and investing context, the word ' would be used to describe a position where the investor owns the underlying asset or an interest in the asset that will appreciate in value if the price rises. The term ' is used to describe a position where an investor has borrowed an asset or has an interest in the asset (e.g.
) that will rise in value when the price falls in value. A bond's duration can be split into two different features. The Macauley duration is the weighted average time to receive all the bond's cash flows and is expressed in years. A bond's modified duration converts the Macauley duration into an estimate of how much the bond's price will rise or fall with a 1% change in the yield to maturity. A bond with a long time to maturity will have larger duration than a short-term bond. As a bond's duration rises, its interest rate risk also rises because the impact of a change in the interest rate environment is larger than it would be for a bond with a smaller duration.
TradeStation's focus on high-quality market data and trade executions and their commitment to superior customer service makes them a good choice for the active trader. Their systems are stable and remain available during market surges. Technical analysis and statistical modeling of trading strategies is another strength of the TradeStation platform. You can develop your own automatic trading system using the analysis tools and strategy backtesting. You can also generate income through the fully-paid stock lending program and enhance your trading skills with the extensive educational offerings. The first screen you'll see after logging into either the downloadable platform or the web platform is TradeStation Today, which includes featured videos, links to workspaces, the firm's Twitter feed and an economic calendar.
The desktop platform, which is a downloadable app, is extensively customizable; the web platform has most of the TradeStation toolset and is a little easier to use. All data streams in real time. You can place, modify, and cancel trades from charts or by using keyboard shortcuts. TradeStation’s trade ticket is called Matrix, and it adapts to the asset class you’re trading. Hovering your mouse over a bid or ask price opens a trade ticket, which you can then modify prior to sending the order.
TradeStation’s order routing engine is based on an assumption that what is displayed in the “market depth” (the price and size of the order) is what is actually available, although with the proliferation of dark pools and hidden orders, there is more liquidity than can be seen with the naked eye, and therefore there is more opportunity for and better execution quality than what is displayed. Their orders are routed to seek out and capture as much price improvement and hidden size as reasonably possible within a reasonable period of time while being mindful of market impact. The sheer number of analytical tools available on TradeStation means there is a learning curve to deal with, but every iteration of the platform has made it easier to use. There are toolbars at the top and on the right of the screen that are the same wherever you are, so you don’t have to figure out different settings depending on which tool you’re using. You can save your watchlists on TradeStation’s server, so you have the same set of quotes no matter which platform you use. The customizability of this platform, from the colors to trading defaults, offers you the ability to really make it your own. Like the desktop platform, all prices on the mobile app are streaming in real time. What’s more, all options strategies can be traded from the mobile app.
There are numerous customization settings for the mobile app, including bypassing a trade confirmation for faster order entry. The mobile apps synch to your desktop or web-based platform, including charting customization settings. The firm added 22 new chart studies to the mobile app over the last year, including Ichimoku clouds. The “Hotlist” tool, which shows major market movers, is included with the mobile app. You can interact with a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. OptionStation Pro is built into the platform, which is a flexible way to analyze strategies and place orders.
The graphical display gives you a picture of the potential profitability of a strategy, which you can adjust in the trade ticket at the bottom of the screen. RadarScreen is an incredibly flexible stock scanner, which lets you create stock screens based on technical and/or fundamental criteria.
TradeStation’s historical data set is second to none, with over 50 years of daily history, 27 years of minute history, and 6 months of tick by tick history. There are no analyst reports available, however, though TradeStation’s in-house market commentary, called TradeStation Market Insights, is available in the desktop platform and is updated five to ten times during the trading day. TradeStation offered more than 300 webinars in 2018, including lessons on placing trades, available asset classes, technical analysis, and options trading. They added to their YouTube channel’s video content and have been offering five-day “Master Class” events in Chicago and Plantation, Florida. You’ll find live education events streaming on all platforms on topics such as using margin, trading ETFs and IPOs (initial public offerings), and cryptocurrencies.
The firm is building out an electronic campus for its TradeStation University, offering courses over a variety of learning tracks, that include content focusing on a particular topic along with quizzes to test what you’ve learned. Investopedia’s mission is to provide investors with unbiased, comprehensive reviews and ratings of online brokers. Our reviews are the result of six months of evaluating all aspects of an online broker’s platform, including the user experience, the quality of trade executions, the products available on their platforms, costs and fees, security, the mobile experience and customer service. We established a rating scale based on our criteria, collecting over 3,000 data points that we weighed into our star scoring system.In addition, every broker we surveyed was required to fill out a 320-point survey about all aspects of their platform that we used in our testing. Many of the online brokers we evaluated provided us with in-person demonstrations of their platforms at our offices.Our team of industry experts, led by, conducted our reviews and developed this best-in-industry methodology for ranking online investing platforms for users at all levels.