Dale,
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I haven't switched to QP2 yet (I will soon), because I was spending most of my time to set up a "backtesting" procedure with MS Access.
The DLL's in QP1 are 16 bits and I couldn't manage to have them running in a 32 bits environment, nor in VB, nor in VC++, but I didn't try very hard.
Backtesting doesn't work with QP1, since the loop(0,-250) starts the scan at Day(0) and goes back to Day(-250), so the first hit is not what you might be looking for while backtesting (I think this is the same problem with QP2). The Input statement only reads a list of tickers, so you cannot test from a starting point which could be associated with a hit either.
In order to test a scan I create the .scn file from Access, launch the scan from there as well n times and store the hits in an Access table together with several indicators (Import lst file). Next I create the list of all the hits and use the QP output to get the price for the selected stocks and measure performance (Import csv file).
Once this process is done (takes some time tough), I can very easily change the selection criteria and see the overall impact (average return, max, min, ...). Unfortunately this cannot overide the scan selection, therefore I keep it simple and refine the selection later on.
This can probably be achieved with some off-the-shelf package, but didn't find which one so far. Any idea?
My next plan (if I don't find a better software) is to use the QP2 DLL's feature from VB or VBA in order to refine this backtesting features, your inputs are thus very useful.
Alain Joaris |
