Innovation is Good, Compatibility is Better !

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danilo
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Innovation is Good, Compatibility is Better !

Postby danilo » 19 Apr 2008

Regarding the NEW auto trading engine, I have understood that big efforts has been made to have a more intelligent execution engine, MC parse and analyze the strategy and try to anticipate the orders, it's really a quantum leap head!, but to be complete need a more intelligent order management engine to avoid to cancel and re-submit always the same orders (sometime having two executions instead of only one(*)) and a new and intelligent back-testing engine with a clever look inside-bar to emulate the behaviour of the NEW auto trading engine. I know that "TS Support" is working hard on that and that for the end of this year the product will be complete and finally MC will be a true innovative product and not only a better TS8 clone.

But it's also important to understand that the NEW trading engine could be not compatible with all the (potentially requested) execution brokers and that there are thousands of strategy developed for TS8/TS2k and tested on TS8/TS2k, and I strongly suggest to don't forget the COMPATIBILITY with TS8(**).

In Summary: I'm asking to give to MC users the options to use the old-style execution engine, to add to the signal "properties" a flag to set the TS8 compatibility mode (like WindowsXP does for Win95). So the users had all the required time to test and eventually rewrite the strategy to use the feature of the NEW engine (***).



Regards,
Danilo

(*) I know that for the NEW autotrading engine this behaviour is considered "normal", but I can assure that a "normal" trader will not accept easily this behaviour.

(**) Since the ONLY reason why the strategy results in TS2k and TS8 are different is that TS2k uses float as numeric, while TS8 uses double, it's also possible add a "compatibility" model also for TS2k "casting" all the time-series in float and perform arithmetic operation using float, that's could be a great benefit for thousands of potential international customers that are still using TS2k (too much decimals add noise instead of information...).
Of course don't forget to allow (only in "compatibility mode") the old TS2k keywords: buy,sell, exitlong, exhitshort; that the international TK2k users are still using.

(***) Remember that IBM OS/2 even if was an innovative OS lost the competition with Microsoft for compatibility reasons...
Last edited by danilo on 19 Apr 2008, edited 2 times in total.

2haerim
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I agree with danilo about the TS2ki compatibility mode

Postby 2haerim » 19 Apr 2008

TS8 is used only in USA and most users in other countries use TS2ki.

TS2ki is old but international users don't have much choice.

I have myself developed Auto converting module for TS2ki's code to MC/TS8 code. I use Alt+Z key for converting the code.

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danilo
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Postby danilo » 20 Apr 2008

HaeRim Lee did a better job that "TS Support", because alt-z is missing as functionality in MC. It's important to understand that all the successful software company have a different approach regarding the compatibility, you can run on WindowsXP a software developed for Windows95 and will works !, but what it’s more incredible to believe is that you will obtain the same results ! I think that thousands of international TS2ki users are expecting a better support from “TS Support” regarding the old software. It’s not only a question of strategy translations, even the results will be different and usually a strategy that has been optimized on TS2ki will works worse on MC, the main reason for that are the different numbers of decimal that are taken into account during the computations (*), this kind of effect is known as "The Butterfly Effect” (**) and is not a bug.

In Summary: MC is going to introduce new functionalities that aren’t compatible with the strategies that has been developed & tested on TS8, not only but forget to add a compatibility layer for the strategies developed & tested on TS2ki, risking to loose potential new customer that are looking to substitute the old TS2ki and are really worried that “TS Support” doesn’t wont support them with a easy compatibility layer like Microsoft did for: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP.

For us MC is just a TOS (Trading Operating System) we write the strategies and we need a STABLE and COMPATIBLE platform where can run reliably. I hope that “TS Support” will change the marketing strategy looking for an easy migration path to the new technologies and trying to don’t loose the thousands of potential new users that are still using TS2ki (why ?).


Regards,
Danilo





(*) as already explained should be enough add a compatibility layer that “cast” to float the time-series and all the results and the input parameters to the MC functions (small effort -> big result)

(**) See the following link for more details: http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/jan-ap ... index.html

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Marina Pashkova
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Postby Marina Pashkova » 23 Apr 2008

Hi guys,

What you are saying makes a lot of sense. However, we are not exactly as big as Microsoft and unlike them can't afford supporting several modes. We simply do not have enough resources to keep up with the amount of work that will increase threefold should we try and implement a new engine on the one hand and ensure compatibility with older TS2000i or TS8 strategies on the other.


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