Hi Rainier, Metastock is pretty limited also in its programming capabilities. There are about 150 or so function calls, but if you eliminate the function calls that are for the built-in indicators, you're not left with much. Probably similar to Supercharts. I'm sure their marketing people make sure they're at least comparable with the sales leader.
You can link to Excel and use VBA to program almost anything, but it's a pain in the ass to do this on more than a couple securities, i.e. as part of a daily routine on a large database. Plus, MetaStock frequently crashes when compute-intensive VBA code is run, so you have to first close Metastock, run the VBA code in Excel, copy the result to the clipboard, reopen MS, then paste. Since I'm not a big fan of VisualBasic, I'd rather develop the complex stuff in Matlab, Mathcad, or C, but still the seamless link isn't there to get back to Metastock, or to do this automatically on a large group of securities. This is not to say that I don't like Metastock overall. It has some good capabilities, but not enough. The data management/organization leaves a bit to be desired, but it's very solid if you stay within the main program. But then again, I don't know of any single program that has everything for a reasonable price. I never really looked into Tradestation because of the price, but if it's native programming language is powerful enough, and all the other things are there, it might be my only choice. Trouble is, 30 days isn't even close to enough time to evaluate such a complex package, especially when you have a day job. I wish they'd develop a Mathcad or Matlab for stocks. There's probably not a big enough market for it though. Another package called Investigator from Pinpoint strategies had some promise. I got it and M/S at the same time. It was lacking some features, but I spent many hours talking to the guy that wrote the code while I was evaluating it. If he gets everything developed that he want to include in it, it should be an excellent package. Its EXTREMELY fast for running system tests on a large universe of stocks because he manages memory/disk usage more efficiently that most. This was about 8 months ago, and I havn't checked back to see the status. I might have to do that.
dh
P.S. I've sent you a few emails over the past couple days with the Excel stuff, and some misc. stuff. Did you receive them? You never know with email!!! |
