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TRADING RECIPES is proud to announce that the 32-bit version of Trading Recipes called Mechanica Standard Edition has been released by our sister company, Mechanica Software, Inc. Please visit Mechanica Software for more information on the release.
 

Overview

TRADING RECIPES is a software program created to give traders the ability to learn, simulate, and manage the job of portfolio trading, i.e. trading multiple markets and multiple systems at once, in dynamic interaction. Now anyone can apply the concepts of dynamic money management and risk control at the portfolio level, while avoiding the dangers of curve-fitting and optimization. Supported markets include futures, stocks, mutual funds and forex.

Using the TRADING RECIPES portfolio trading research platform, your simulations can now involve multiple open positions in two, three, or any number of markets, simultaneously traded with one, two, multiple systems on top of that. You will have the power to visualize the combined day-to-day trading activity of a single system across multiple markets and even of multiple systems across multiple markets.   As a user put it "This opens up whole new worlds and is like seeing in color after seeing only in black and white looking at single [market] tests".

To the best of our knowledge, TRADING RECIPES is the only commercially available portfolio trading software with dynamic money management. It has been developed over the past 12 years and sold and supported continuously since 1992. It is not specifically geared toward the professional trader, although quite a few well known traders and professional money managers use it. It is also a tool for those who want to become professionals and for those who want to learn how to use trading to become more self sufficient.

Concepts

Traders often want to focus on risk and avoid volatile results. A low variability of returns is the same as having a smooth equity curve. Once this is achieved, leverage can then be used to arrive at the desired results, according to each trader's risk tolerance and capitalization.

One of the best ways to achieve a "smooth" equity curve is to use multiple trading strategies/systems across a variety of markets. The intuitive reason why, is that while one market is performing in a certain manner, one of the other markets in the portfolio may be offsetting it by doing something else, thereby averaging out the spikes and troughs of the individual market results and provide a smoother ride.

TRADING RECIPES' approach lets you combine trading signals and trade sizing strategies into simulations which exactly mimic the way you would trade in real time. A core feature, which sets it apart from all other "money management" (or backtesting) software, is its ability to perform dynamic money management (DMM) and risk control at the portfolio level. With DMM, position sizes are determined with full knowledge of what's going on at the portfolio level at the moment the sizing decision is made. Just like you do in reality. Other software packages simply sum individual pre-calculated equity curves. This way, position sizes are calculated with no knowledge of what the current portfolio conditions are at the crucial moment when a position sizing decision is to be made. This is not how you would make decisions in reality and therefore such simulations offer no useful information to the trader. DMM avoids this pitfall.

Simulated trading results of supplied trading system

See the simulated trading results of an $80,000 account, trading 15 futures markets simultaneously, with a trend-following system which is supplied FREE along with TRADING RECIPES. Read the analysis and discussion on a public Internet forum for traders. These will help you realize the potential of TRADING RECIPES as a systems research platform, as well as help you grasp the concepts of portfolio trading  and dynamic position-sizing. (more)

User commentary

Over the years, traders have been sharing their success using TRADING RECIPES publicly: in newsletters, Internet forums, Usenet newsgroups, Web-boards, mailing-lists etc. In this part of our Website, we present reprints and extracts of such public unsolicited commentary that we have recently collected mostly over the Internet, some of it dating back in 1994. (more)

Informational & educational resources for traders

We are building a library of informational and educational resources for traders, putting special emphasis in the area of betsizing and multi-market portfolio trading, which are the features which make TRADING RECIPES so unique. (more)

Slide-show demonstration

We have prepared a slide-show presentation, outlining the basic functionality of the software. Download it to get a better understanding of the concepts and operations of TRADING RECIPES. (more)