MC Improvements

Questions about MultiCharts and user contributed studies.
Fabrice Daniel
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MC Improvements

Postby Fabrice Daniel » 31 May 2009

Hi,

Here is a Mind Map summarizing my suggestions for MC improvements. This includes improvements of existing features for short term as well as new features for long term.

Of course, this is only a Mind map, not a specification but most of these features already exists into TS (Perf Report format) or AB (Backtest database). The only new stuff is the PL Editor script navigator with tags, notes and version manager.

Because trading system developement require many versions, all of us are managing it manually (MySystem V1.0, MySystem V1.1, ...). In the development world version manager exist for a long time (CVS, ...) but nobody provide such feature to trading system developpers.

The tags and properties attached to the scripts allows to categorize them and to provide the best navigation and search capabilities. It's very convenient when you have many scripts to manage.

Don't ask me for the caption, it's a Mind map, so the icons or cliparts are for "right brain" usage, it's not a "Formal IT Methodology" or any things like that, it's a pure creativity tool.

In general I use the "numbers" as an "indication of priority", the light bulb is for new ideas (new features) and the smileys are (in general) for the stuff I will be the most happy with (a kind of priority). In this map I used the smileys on the "Tag" topic for PL Editor for another purpose : illustration of the Script status and developper feeling about it.
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Andrew Kirillov
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Postby Andrew Kirillov » 03 Jun 2009

Fabrice,
Thanks for the mind map. It looks cool. It is a good idea to show your feeling of a perfect product. I suggest other users try to do the same. It is easy to read and nice to work with.
A few comments about your feature requests:
1. Hundred and thousands separator is OS setting. You can set it in Regional settings in control panel.
2. We have a setting ”No of digits after decimal” in Performance Report->Settings
3. Why Strategy Performance summary is not what you are looking for?
4. We allow to save a report to XLS and thus you can send it in html or pdf. All you need to install a plug-in for you Excel.
5. Trade orders and connection lines will be done soon.
6. What is a reason to have a separate category for paintbars and showmes? It is all indicators.
7. New detailed equity curve report. Why do you need to plot instrucment’s data on the report if we added chart-report synchronization – you just click on the necessary place on a equity curve and a cursor will be set to this timestamp on a chart scrolling a data for you.

Fabrice Daniel
Posts: 71
Joined: 25 Aug 2007
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Postby Fabrice Daniel » 06 Jun 2009

Hi Andrew,

1. Good, i will check
2. Ok
3. Two problems with the Summary

- The first is a "design" one. Inserting blank lines between some "zones" or category of informations makes it much easier to read. Ok it's nothing but when you often switch quickly from a screen to another (like I do) it's much more comfortable.

- The second is to be able to see more informations into a single summary. Today I have to switch between three reports to have a good overview of the system behaviour : Summary, Performance Ratio and Total Trade Analysis. Into TS all of these infomations are displayed into a single page. Your reports are much better than the TS ones but two or three presentation modes in TS are more convenient to use.

The best feature to add to Performance reports could be to let the user design it's own custom report. This could especially be very convenient for publishers (magazine, blogs, ...) looking for custom reports into their articles. All of us only used less than 10 key metrics to get a good overview of the system performances, risk/reward characteristics and consistency. The very detailed informations are important too, but only in a second stage for depth analysis of the most "promising" systems. 90% of time we need an easy too read and convenient overview.

Please look at the report into this article I wrote 3 years ago (article is in french but report is in english).

http://www.addictfx.biz/article-2199878.html

Only the most important metrics are displayed with an Equity Curve. Only the Sharpe and K-Ratio are missing. Of course, for depth analysis I use many other informations displayed into the MC reports, but this first "template" allow me filtering out 90% of the poor systems very quickly.

having such kind of small custom report + equitycurve on a single page could be a top feature.

4. Ok

5. GOOD News, many thanks

6. Yes but it's only for a better organization. Sometimes I can't remember the exact name of an indicator I didn't use for long time, but I always remember if it was a paint bar, A show me or a "line" indicator. This "visual memory" allow me to reduce the list and to find it quickly (into TS). The script properties system I propose extend this system, with category, tags, search feature. For people managing many systems and indicators it could be a very convenient tool. The only purpose is to organise and find quickly what we want without having to scroll on a very long list of scripts.

7. Yes, and thank you for this very useful feature.

The feature I'm talking about have another purpose. I have to check quickly what the market characteristics are when a system is losing money. Puting the instrument line chart and the equity curve into a single screen allows to dectect an intraday system is performing poorly on daily traging range periods for example.

This is especially useful when a system is trading on intraday bars because it's difficult to see what the global trend is when you look at the the intraday chart, even using the "automatic cursor" you talk about. The only way to find correlations between intraday results and the longer term trend or trading range consist on switching between several charts and views.

I hope this could help you to improve MC.
Congratulations again for this Gold Release.


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