I am new to this forum, currently on a trial version, testing both close-to-close and intraday strategies on stock and Futures.
I unsuccessfully tried to find an answer to my question in the forum, but maybe I missed it somewhere, in this case I apologize in advance.
I don't understand the logic of the profit & loss computation in the Strategy Analyzer, on the Graphs tab as on the Trades tab. I think the core information about the profit & loss evolution over time is missing.
Let's take a very simple example with a stock quoting $1.00 at the begining of the year and going up $1.00 each trading day of the year.
So:
on January 1st 2012: Buy 1 share of AAAAA @ $1
on December 31st 2012: Sell 1 share of AAAAA @ $250
and each day between those dates, you make $1 profit.
On the Graphs tab and on the Trades tab, you will see nothing between those dates, but you will see a profit of $249 on December 31st on the Trades tab, as well as a huge gap of $249 on the graph, concentrated on December 31st.
The rest of the graph from January 1st to Decemvber 30th will be completely flat, which is illogic.
When you manage a portfolio, you have to monitor your PnL in real time.
So when backtesting a strategy, you should be able to monitor the PnL on a day-to-day basis (in a better world, we should even be able to zoom on a minute-by-minute or tick-by-tick period).
So my question:
- am I missing something in the set up of my NT7?
- or is it a well-known bug?
The current way of interpreting the PnL as it appears on my screens is useless and could even be dangerous as it does not represent at all the way your strategy will fluctuate while it is run in real time.
Many thanks in advance for your help.
Regards.
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