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Reports

Quick Report aids in rapid system development to get your system into the analysis phase fast.

Select more detailed reports to analyze system performance on a full portfolio or on a system dedicated to trading only one market.

Create a Daily Report (when current data is selected) which may be communicated to your broker for trade execution and/or stop placement. It includes details of entry and exit stops, risk, margin, equity for open trades, trades coming up (in range of a limit price move ), and trades exited during the session. Thus, once you begin trading your system in real-time, RECIPES can generate the order sheets for you.

Save various reports for later viewing or export a multi-year, multi-market income stream to your spreadsheet, statistical, or scientific software for further analysis.

User Friendly

The menuing system will be immediately familiar to anyone using products such as Windows and Excel.

Short Cut Keys are noted inside pull down menus. (For example, to run a system, press F9)

Create and save as many different systems as you wish.

Open or retrieve an existing system the same as you would any file.

Simple Powerful Language

The user applies "Trading BASIC", an easy-to-learn yet powerful English-like language to specify the trading rules.

Indicator values can be arranged in Columns for easy reference.

Graphics capability allows you to "visually" inspect entries and exits to quickly debug trading systems or to refine strategies, as well as view your chosen indicators. Portfolio Graphics put extraordinary power at your fingertips.

Simple Examples:
Have Column 1 hold target values for long trades (the 10 day high as of yesterday in this case):
COL1 = MAX[HIGH,10,1]

Trade long on the open today if yesterday's high exceeded the previous 10 day high:
IF HIGH[1] > COL1[1] THEN BUYOPEN


Data

The most popular formats are supported. Metastock, CSI, Technical Tools as well as various ASCII formats (Date[YYYYMMDD], Open, High, Low, Close, Volume, Open-Interest", zero-filled fields are OK) and our own HST format optimised for historical backtesting. RECIPES expects price adjusted (continuous) data for Historical testing. You simply "tag" the markets for the years you want and press a key to start backtesting.

Tool Box Indicators

Select the indicators your system will use from a list of popular Technical Studies, including RSI, %R, Stochastics, Volatility, moving averages, and others.

Fill out an on-screen form to specify your parameters then simply Paste the indicator or function into the text of your program.

Flexible entry and exit

Orders can be dollar amounts or a specific price.

Trading in or out can occur:

at the open
at a target price
on a stop basis
on a limit basis
at the close
on a stop close only basis.
on an OCO basis

Portfolio Testing for any combination of markets

Test your system using any Portfolio design. Test the combination of markets that suits your system and style.

Use any desired combination of markets:

Even if your system has you in two or more multi-contract commodity positions at the same time along with any number of stock positions, accounting is handled just as it is in a brokerage house. Account equity is marked to the market on the close, as are margin and risk.

Select as many years of Historical data as you wish for each simulation.

Various reports help you analyze the performance of the combinations you choose.

Test Money Management Strategies using "What-If" analysis

A well-designed money management strategy can save you from possible financial ruin (by letting you know what the correct level of risk has been for your system historically). It can also enhance the performance of your system. TRADING RECIPES allows you to determine the number of contracts to trade (manage risk and capital) based on any combination of:

1)	Equity available at the time a new trade comes up.
2)	Total Portfolio Risk carried at the time a new trade is presented.
3)	Additional Risk which would be incurred if a position under consideration were to be executed.
4)	Number of current open positions in a single market Group.
5)	Risk in open positions within a market group.
6)	Margin requirements.
7)	Start up capital.
8)	Current market Volatility.

Examples:
The following statement tells RECIPES that you will trade the number of contracts that will risk 20% of your equity:

NEWCONTRACTS = (EQUITY * .2) / NEWRISK


The following statement sets the number of contracts to trade (limit size of risk) so that risk is limited to 30% of the equity not already at risk:

NEWCONTRACTS = (EQUITY * .30 - TOTALRISK) / NEWRISK


This statement spreads risk by not loading up with positions in any one market group like financials or grains:

IF GROUPOSITIONS < 2 THEN NEWCONTRACTS = (EQUITY * .20) /NEWRISK


You can also:
Vary the amount of start-up capital in order to gauge the effect on the portfolio income stream as varying numbers of contracts are traded.
Determine the minimum amount of capital required to trade your system.

Most Interesting Feature. The Worst-Case Analysis

The Worst-Case analysis allows you to create a report that will tell you how your system would have done based on the start date. RECIPES automatically selects each trade in sequence making it the very first trade entered. Results of each run are saved to a row in an ASCII text file. Imagine the knowledge you will gain by examining the results your system provides when run from 1000 different start points rather than just 1. How many times out of 1000 did it have a losing first year? Second year? How many times out of 1000 did equity reach $1 million by year 5? What was the average capital requirement out of 1000 starts? What was the highest? How many times out of 1000 did drawdown exceed 50%? Answers to this type of question will let you know with a high degree of probability what to expect from your system in real trading. This is an excellent tool for projecting how your system will perform in the real world. And if you are inclined, the file can be imported to a spreadsheet for further statistical analysis.

Grid display

The Grid helps in system development by providing you a means to quickly visualize a market position in the context of its associated data. Associated data could be indicator values or custom formula values. It allows you to accurately verify, as no other method can, that your system is entering and exiting trades exactly when expected. You can also use the graphics module to visually inspect exit/entry points, as well as indicators and price data.

The leftmost column of the Grid displays the date. Each row represents one day.

Data associated with a particular date will be found in cells on the same row, just like a spreadsheet, in the column that you have specified. For example: COL1 = HIGH, etc.

Other pre-defined columns contain:
Entry price (highlighted each day a position is open)
Exit value for each day (highlighted when a trade is exited)
User defined items including toolbox indicators, custom formula values or event flags for True/False

The result is that each data item is clearly associated with a date and market position for that date. The Grid is the tool to use when fine-tuning trade logic or when debugging a complex system.

Don't feel inhibited by all the data available. In no time, you will be able to quickly gather and analyze information to help you fine-tune your trading system, BEFORE you risk your capital in the markets.

Hardware and operating-system software specifications

Hardware requirements are a PC with 64MB RAM and about 20MB space on the harddisk (plus the diskspace required to store your market databases). TRADING RECIPES is a 16-bit application, but most users run it under WindowsXP, Windows95/98, WindowsNT4 or Windows2000.
 
Laptops without parallel ports will require a third party pc card device to accept a dongle. Please contact us for details. Sony Viao laptops are not supported.