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Over the years, users have been sharing their success using TRADING RECIPES publicly: in newsletters, Internet forums,  Usenet newsgroups, Web-boards, mailing-lists etc. Here follow reprints and extracts of such commentary that we have collected, presented in reverse chronological order, some of it dating back in 1994.

 

"I'm a Trading Recipes user. I'm a rabid enthusiast; heck I bought a second computer whose ONLY purpose is to run Trading Recipes, I love it so much. It's a great program.

TR is backtesting tool that lets you try out various systematic trading ideas *AND* position sizing ideas, on historical data. But it's so much more advanced than the usual competitors (xxadestation, yyetastock), that it'll make your head spin:

(1) TR is designed from the ground up to trade a PORTFOLIO of securities. None of this one-market-at-a-time baloney that other software packages enforce.
(2) TR has a dozen builtin "money management" (position sizing) functions, letting you carefully incorporate risk, margin, #longs (vs. #shorts), grouprisk (grains, meats, currencies etc), total portfolio heat, and so on. Find *ANY* other software that does this -- I haven't.
(3) TR lets you trade several different systems at the same time, out of the same account. For the moment, consider only the universe of vendor systems; TR lets you simulate what happens if you trade Chuck's Prudent S&P, along with Catscan, Aberration, Benchmark, and The Turtle System, all at once. Does the equity curve smooth out? Do returns increase while drawdowns decrease? Does it pay to add more systems to the mix? (answers: yes, yes, yes)

I bought Trading Recipes in 1995 and have kept it in continuous use ever since. I used it to test over 100 combinations of (system-of-entries-and-exits) plus (position-sizing-algorithms), until I found one that was a good match for my own personality and emotions. It took me a long time to do all these tests, but the result has been that I am completely overjoyed with my real-time, real-money results, trading in reality what I tested in the computer using Trading Recipes.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Trading Recipes or with its vendor, Bob Spear, except as an EXTREMELY satisfied customer. " -- M.J. Tuesday, January 9, 2001

"Recipes is far superior. I have used Trading Recipes and Trade Station for about 5 years. I have also used Rina Systems quite a bit as well. Basically Trading Recipes is a MUCH faster and FAR SIMPLER way to do portfolio analysis. Recipes lets you test your entire portfolio all at once, Rina requires that you individually test every market in your portfolio first and then export them to a file and them pull them back into the Rina program. A test that would take a few minutes in Recipes could easily take several hours with Rina (I'm not kidding!) Also, after you have done your testing Recipes calculates all of the important studies for your portfolio, max draw down, graphs, profit distributions etc. Rina requires you recalculate for each one of these. The bottom line is that if you want to get the job 10 times faster with 10 times less frustration (and system crashes) then use Trading Recipes. I began using Trading Recipes many years ago when one the "Market Wizards" from Jack Schwagers book recommended it to me, I've loved it ever since." -- D.H., Mon, December 18, 2000

"Since early January of 2000, this series of postings has described my project developing a fixed-fractional position-sizing strategy. I explained how I have developed the money-management methods I have been using in real time trading individual markets. In the last installment of this series, I announced that I was starting work on stage two of the project, the portfolio-testing stage, because I now have TRADING RECIPES --the only commercially available program for such testing.
[..]
In sum, Trading Recipes has given me the means to finalize development of my fixed-fractional strategy. Without it, I would be flying blindfold. I will be exploring alternative strategies that use a different fraction (f) for each market. I will report on any significant findings. Otherwise, consider this post the last of my Two-Stage Position Sizing series" -- P.W., Wed June 28, 2000

"I saw some of the postings re: Trading Recipes. I've been using this software since late 1992. The benefits of backtesting not only trading systems, but portfolios using money management strategies cannot be over-emphasized. I spent two years developing both trading systems and money management strategies before putting real money at risk, and every single minute of those two years was well spent! I wrote several articles for Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities (Mar/Apr 94) based on some of the work I had done at the time." -- A.J., Sun February 20, 2000

"I know S&P 500 traders with about 50 pages of EL code for their system, knowing every move (real or fictitious) tick-by-tick of price movements, etc. There is a TV announcement and Secretary of State starts his speech with word "Unfortunately ..." and S&P500 drops billion points. Since then there are "famous" traders only trading the index on short side.
[...]
As a portfolio manager, you write a "four line" Donchian code and apply it to 150 markets. You don't pay attention to details of individual trades. You develop a total measure of "risk-adjusted return". Then you make changes to your system, apply it to your portfolio, and watch a couple of numbers coming out of your box. They measure your performance.
[...]
If you are a corporate style trader then you will be using tools like TradeStation. If you want to trade as a fund manager, you have go through a complete metamorphosis to enter a new brave world of portfolio trading. Here you absolutely need a tool like the Trading Recipes." -- I.D., Fri Feb 11, 2000

"I read lots of books, fooled around with differential equations on the blackboard, and started to program up some geometric betting algorithms into Trading Recipes.
[...]
As those of you who have read the other Club 3000 issue (#99.04) know, I finally settled upon a betsize algorithm that includes dollar-distance-to-my-stoploss (which I define as my risk per contract, "R1"), semi-fixed-fractional betting, and variable aggressiveness which depends upon equity.

THIS IS THE "SECRET" OF HOW I WAS ABLE TO MAKE MONEY USING A VENDOR-SUPPLIED MECHANICAL SYSTEM: BETSIZE SELECTION.

In fact, about 18 months ago I wrote a message on the omega-list that showed test results for three different mechanical systems, but using identical geometric betsize selection. All three made huge profits! One was a good system (Aberration), one was average (Market Annihilator), and one was below average but profitable (Virtuoso). The size of the profits varied a bit, but all of them did very well, handily beating "buy and hold the S&P 500" by a substantial margin.

The "magic", if there is any, isn't in the entries and exits. The magic is in the betsizes." -- M.J., May 24, 1999

"Like the other authors, I too am a delighted customer and user of Trading Recipes. I use it for position trading employing end-of-day data. (My datafeed is Technical Tools Chartbook95).

I don't happen to like the phrase "money management" -- to me it sounds like the advice you get on Wall Street Week with Lumpy Rutherford: put X% in gold, Y% in real estate, Z% in stocks, and the rest in AA rated municipal bonds. But what's going on in futures trading is different: you're trying to figure out what size positions to take. So rather than calling it "money management", I will say "betsize calculation".

And Trading Recipes is simply the best there is, at betsize calculation for futures trading. It lets you trade multiple commodities out of the same account, and apply the same betsizing rules to all. For example, this idea is easy to try out in TR (and impossible in Omega products):

Risk 2% of equity on every trade, BUT don't let my total risk exposure exceed 30% of equity, AND don't let my exposure in any one commodity group (grains, meats, currencies, oils, etc) exceed 15% of equity.

Further, Trading Recipes lets you trade several SYSTEMS out of the same account, each system trading (if you wish) multiple commodities. So you can test the following idea:

Trade "UniversalLT" and "Catscan" and "Aberration" out of the same account. Risk 1% of equity on every trade that Aberration takes, 1/2% on every trade that Catscan takes, and risk a fixed $500/trade on every trade that UniversalLT takes. But never let my total risk exposure in any one commodity exceed 3% of equity.

Trading Recipes has builtin functions that let you take trades AT RANDOM, for example to test entries or exits all by themselves. You can finally test that system Larry Williams keeps talking about, enter at random and then exit on the first profitable open.

I have programmed the "ROI" betsize calculation algorithm of Rumery and Lehman's "Performance One" package, into Trading Recipes. It takes one line of code. Except that I am obsessive-compulsive about code so I add two more lines to find and fix situations in which it *might* take the square root of a negative number, and two more lines to find and fix situations in which the calculated number of contracts to trade is not an integer. But, five lines of code ain't so terrible; remember that TradeStation can't do this at all.

Sure it's a DOS program. Low-res graphics. Clunky spreadsheet user interface. GREAT analysis. This program has helped me study betsize selection algorithms more thoroughly than any other tool, and I am sure it gets credit for a large part of my trading success." -- M.J., Tue October 27, 1998

"This is a great product. The guy who who invented the product is now trading a sizaable portfolio. I have seen traders make money because you can trade and money manage an entire portfolio. When this product you can toss TS and merely use the Net for quotes. This product is not for Day Traders. It is more for traders who understand and wish to grasp the importance of portfolio management.

I have a profile of a trader who uses Trading Recipes. No, folks, he is not in the seminar circuit. And I have all his trading statements. And the good news you do not have to learn a new trading language." -- Neil Weintraub - CME teacher, Monday, October 26, 1998

"Anyone has experience with program "Trading Receipes" which may lead some close to Holy Grail ?
>
>Believe this is a difficult 'clunky' program with outstanding insights.

Trading Recipes is certainly not the "Holy Grail" nor does it have any outstanding insights per se. It is however, in my opinion, the best program for backtesting on EOD data. It doesn't have the flexibility of TS and can only accept daily data, but it also doesn't have many of the idosyncracies of TS. Trading Recipes only uses daily data, so many may not find it of much use. It's most unique feature is the ability to incorporate money management logic on a portfolio level. This opens up whole new worlds and is like seeing in color after seeing only in black and white looking at single tests. I think the Omega "Portfolio Analyzer" will allow you to do similar things, but it seems to be a work-around rather than an elegant solution. Trading Recipes is a DOS program and is "clunky" compared to new windows programs. But it is also lightning fast. I'm mainly a stock trader, so I like to test trading strategies over several hundred stocks. I could care less what the results of INTC or MSFT are individually, which TS can tell me. I want to know what my equity curve looks like when I'm trading INTC,MSFT, and a half dozen other things at the same time, which is what Trading Recipes can tell me in a heartbeat. It is expensive, but for some people, especially more hard-core backtesting types that aren't scared of a little programming, it may be just the thing." -- L.McW. Monday, October 26, 1998>

"Bob Spear of RW Systems in Houston sent a demo disk for TRADING RECIPES. It shows you what kind of output his toolbox provides as well as some examples of how a trading system is programmed. This is a very powerful piece of software and provides the user with a graphical overview of the results in addition to the customary table of performance figures.

You may be aware that my personal preference is to put together my own system from scratch. Actually, I started out in 1977, before there were personal computers and commercial trading software. MS-DOS was nothing but a gleam in Bill Gates' eye. I had a Data General NOVA computer (with 16K memory!!!) that remained after I had sold my company and, since I had always been intrigued by computer monitoring of the markets, I started out revamping my very successful inventory control system for equity markets. Both inventory and market action are driven by supply and demand, The hardest part was programming the bookkeeping module, without which you are flying blind. I did OK with puts and calls in the stock market and got involved with futures several years later, also successfully. Very successfully, as a matter of fact.

I don't know where Bob Spear was at the time or what he was doing, but a copy of TRADING RECIPES would have been a godsend, particularly since it addresses the vital money management issue. I spent hundreds of hours, ratcheting up from a rudimentary program to one that accurately monitored performance and graphed the price curves, entry and exit points, stops, the individual and total equity, but did not get into money management until late in the game.

There is a good feature about designing your own system. If something goes wrong, you don't have to get mad at a vendor, you can just look in the mirror and then go back to the drawing board. (Just be sure that you get enough good sleep.) It is a lot of fun to think about trading strategies, getting up every morning with your head full of ideals, programming them and seeing the results. Strangely enough, the seemingly "most sensible" ideas don't work at all.

If you have a taste for this kind of activity, you can't do any better than Trading Recipes. Bob Spear has a solid reputation for supporting his customers, according to what I hear from members. Trading system ideas are available in several books, by LeBeau/Lucas, Murphy, Pardo, Sherry, Wilder and countless other." -- Bo Thunman, Editor of Club3000 Newsletter, 94.15 p8 - 1994 - Reprinted with permission

"I am one of the original purchasers of a portfolio-level testing software program by the name of TRADING RECIPES. This is my 15th year of active part-time futures trading. Like many other members, I believe that I have read about and/or tried just about every systematic mechanical trading method that has come down the pike, with mixed (but always educational and many times expensive) results.

I can say without reservation that TRADING RECIPES is the most valuable trading tool that I have ever had. I have used the program every trading day for about two years now and I have written several profitable trading programs. But more importantly, I have been able to construct an entire trading methodology that suits my individual wants, needs and trading style. This program is so complete and so fast, I sometimes wonder how I ever did testing or even trading without it.

And the vendor - Bob Spear - is truly a gentleman. He has always been helpful when I call with questions. He is a trader himself and "speaks the language".

I was completely satisfied with the version that I had been using, but I recently purchased the latest update because it has a new graphics module and some other useful features. I might also add that some of the public-domain systems that he includes as examples are really very good and historically test and walk forward very well.

There is also an example of a simple money management program that is hard to beat - you just plug in your dollar amounts and percentages and you can test any trading rules with any money management rules that you can think of, for any portfolio, for any or all of your data, all in a matter of minutes. It's really amazing!

If you are a serious end-of-day, data update, run your analysis, place your orders for the next day, position trader like I am, do yourself a favor and contact Bob Spear about a demo disk. He and the TRADING RECIPES software receive my highest recommendation." -- Bob Aughey, Club3000 Newsletter, 94.11 p3 - 1994 - Reprinted with permission