Strategy Analyzer always comes up all zeros

[meegwell]

Hello all, Im new here.

I spent a lot of time trying before deciding to post. Im completely new to NT and have tooled around and read all of the portions of the manual that are relevant to what I would like to do (maybe half of it ~400 pages). Im in "free sim mode" so to say. The learning curve.

I have a variety of issues but right now I just want to resolve one.

I want to run a simple back test on a single stock with one of the canned strategies (ie Simple MAcrossover). Naturally I want to do much more than this but I cant get past this learning step.

Ive read the steps and watched the videos.

I have fooled a lot with instruments and data while trying to figure it out. In a nutshell, I have now connected with Yahoo and I was able to add a new instrument and get historical data for it - and created a chart from that.

When I run Strat. Analyzer to back test, I choose this stock (I have also chosen various others from the provided data like within the dow 30) I change the type to Day (Ive also tried weeks and originally had minutes I believe) and change the timeframe to about a year, which is less thnt the data I have for the chart. Ive also tried shorter time frames. Most other stuff Ive left to default I believe.

Ive adjusted eeh fast and slow MAs to make it more likely to cross often just for the sake of testing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. When I hit Run Back Test is takes about asplit second and shows me all zeros.

The only log events are my data connect and reconnect (I previously used external feed and Kinec-whatever that recomended one is).


Help a noob out if you can,

Meegwell

[Trader.Jon]

Meegwell,

Please attach your strategy so someone can run it and look at the results.

TJ

[hunter]

Meegwell,

This may be overly simplistic but how are you selecting the stock and running the backtest?
To run a back test you need to right click on the stock of interest and select backtest from the context sensitive list that pops up.
The backtest will not work by selecting a stock (left click) then clicking the backtest tab on the right hand side of the window.

Hunter.

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

Meegwell, welcome to our forums here - if you're working with Kinetick or Yahoo free end of day data please only attempt to work with daily bars or higher, as intraday data would not be available here.

For the strategy - if you create the chart for a DOW30 stock and then place the strategy enabled (input Enabled = true) directly on the chart - are you then seeing any trades taken?

[meegwell]

Thank you all for the input. I can answer a few of the items here:

I did use daily or higher.

I did right click>Backtest (not overly simplistic because I did screw that up - although this was an earlier issue I resolved after reading the manual or seeing the video)

Trader.Jon the strategy Im using is simply the canned MA crossover that comes installed. Im just at the very beginning of learning NT and cant seem to get any backtest to work. Im not in front of it, but IM not sure I would know how to attach it - but it should be the same as in everybody's install (Version 7) with only the input adjustments I noted in my original post.

I will try the chart recomendation when I get to my PC.

Thank you all again,

Meegwell

[meegwell]

Looking good

Thanks again for the input. Tonight when I sat down, the first thing I did was the attempt to run a strategy from a chart. I definately did NOT have the Enabled=True set last time I tried this. It worked. Then I went to strategy analyzer and ran a back test on a dow 30. That worked. I have since imported a screened list of stocks and it all seems to be working fine.

Is there some sort of "kick off" to initially load historical data? I remember playing around with that maybe in the data manager.

Regardless, my primary obstacle has been passed and Im now beginning the experimentation phase with Ninja Script (wizard) to write my own or modify existing strategies.

Thank You all again,

Meegwell

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Glad to hear your up and running.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.