Unleash the Power of Algorithmic & Automated Trading
MultiCharts is a professional charting and automated trading platform, designed for futures, stock, and forex traders.
A key feature of MultiCharts is the compatibility with industry-standard TradeStation® EasyLanguage®.
EasyLanguage® studies can be customized, optimized, and back-tested prior to implementing them on the real market.
MultiCharts includes very powerful and flexible charting that
handles multi-symbol and multi-timeframe charts, and works with most leading streaming data vendors.
Time-based and Count-based, as well as Bid, Ask, or Trade-based data series can be mixed within the same chart.
According to a reviews in Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES, the premier magazine for technical traders,
"TS Support has come up with something that is fast, flexible, and robust. They seem to have considered the needs of every type of trader when they developed [MultiCharts]."
Please read this and other reviews of MultiCharts by leading financial magazines.
Strategy Creation and Testing
Trading signals can be created in MultiCharts' EasyLanguage®-compatible PowerLanguage,
and back-tested by using the historical data prior to implementing the strategy on the real market. MultiCharts comes with over eighty pre-built trading signals, any of which can
easily be modified. MultiCharts' strategy creation offers unparalleled flexibility options:
• Test strategies utilizing various order types and multiple entry and exit signals
• Create strategies by combining an unlimited number of signals
• High-precision backtesting
← new for 5.5
• Automatically route signals to Interactive Brokers
• Set secondary strategy options such as commission, slippage, initial capital, interest rate, and trade size
• Customize the signals' appearance on the chart
← improved in 5.5
• Set visual and audio alerts
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MultiCharts offers an extensive Strategy Performance Report based on the historical data.
In addition to the exhaustive statistics, the report provides advanced analysis tools for evaluating the results of strategies' historical trading performance:
Performance Tabs
The Strategy Performance Report includes more than 196 performance measurements to help analyze, based on the historical data, the strategy's trading performance. The measurements include the average winning and losing trades, the number of consecutive winning and losing trades, the average time in trades, and the longest time period between winning and losing trades. A list of established risk-reward ratios can be used to evaluate how the strategy performed in respect to the entry and exit efficiency, time in the market, and stability. Trade-by-Trade section of the report can be sorted by the total percentage of profit, total efficiency rating, run-up, etc.
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Performance Charts
MultiCharts Performance Report includes more than 25 graphs that visually present the strategies' trading performance data.
Whether you're back-testing a strategy over a day, a year, or even 20 years of intra-day historical market data, Performance Report
instantly lets you know if the strategy would have been profitable in the past, displays the annual rate of return, number of winning and losing trades, and much more.
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Portfolio Trading
Applying a trading strategy to a number of financial instruments simultaneously offers several advantages:
• Portfolio diversification could produce more consistent results
• Infrequent trading opportunities will be more common across a number of symbols
• Portfolio strategies can maximize profit and minimize risks by allocating the capital within a portfolio dynamically, based on each instrument's performance. Keep in mind that trading financial instruments involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors
• Portfolio strategies can enter, scale-in, scale-out, or exit positions based on the overall portfolio performance
• Portfolio strategies are generally more robust and less susceptible to over-optimization
A dynamic portfolio strategy is more then simply a collection of separate strategies, and takes in to account a number of additional factors, such as capital limits, entry orders priority, money and risk management, and overall portfolio performance.
Portfolio Backtesting
Portfolio backtesting offers a number of advantages:
• Backtesting a strategy on a single instrument may not produce enough trades to distinguish a pattern from a coincidence
• Backtesting a strategy on a number of instruments is more likely to reveal any shortcomings and helps to avoid over-optimization
• A robust strategy is likely to demonstrate consistent profitability across various instruments
• By backtesting on a diverse portfolio, the instruments most suitable for the particular trading strategy can be selected
True Dynamic Portfolio Backtesting simulates the actions of a real trader by taking into account the overall portfolio considerations dynamically, during the evaluation of each bar. Portfolio equity and the available capital are dynamically evaluated for every instrument, on every bar, in order to determine the amount available to be invested. When the available capital is insufficient to enter all of the trading opportunities that arise simultaneously, the best opportunities are selected according to user-customizable criteria. In addition to the performance of a particular instrument, portfolio drawdown or other portfolio performance aspects can be taken into consideration when making entry and exit decisions.
Major Portfolio Backtesting Features:
• Ability to apply different strategies to different symbols within a portfolio
• Ability to assign priority to symbols and strategies within a portfolio
• Ability to mix symbols with different resolutions within a portfolio
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Strategy Optimization
A strategy is created by implementing trading concepts, ideas, and observations of historical market behavior, into a trading system. The very idea of a trading system implies a degree of optimization to market behavior.
The process of strategy optimization further enhances and automates this process. Strategy optimization is the search for the set of optimum parameters for the defined criteria. By testing a range of signal input values,
optimization aids in selecting the values that correspond, based on historical data, to the best strategy performance. Optimization aids in better understanding of strategy's characteristics and in creating new criteria for
entries and exits. MultiCharts offers three optimization methods:
Exhaustive, or Brute-Force, Optimization
Exhaustive optimization systematically goes through all the potential combinations in search for the best solution.
The length of time required to find the solution it is proportional to the total number of all possible solutions. Unless relatively few parameters are involved, the
period of time required to reach a solution by this approach becomes unacceptably long. Thus, exhaustive optimization is only suitable when there is a limited number of possible solutions.
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Genetic Algorithms
By using the genetic algorithms, a near-optimum solution can be found in a fraction of the time required by the brute-force approach. The "breeding" process of genetic solutions screens out the over-optimized, curve-fitting solutions that would not prove effective in real trading. The genetic algorithms method is powerful enough to analyze hundreds of parameters within an acceptable timeframe, and the Genetic Optimizer settings add flexibility to this technique.
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Walk-forward Optimization
← new for 5.5
The walk-forward optimization can be used with both the Exhaustive and Genetic optimization types. The walk-forward optimization makes it possible to run optimization on the in-sample data and then backtest the strategy on the out-sample data with the best parameters found during the previous step.
Custom Fitness Function Optimization
This feauture gives traders an ability to set their own search criteria for the strategy optimization. Optimization based on multiple criteria allows finding strategies that meet a number of conditions instead of maximizing a single performance measure. For example, it can find a strategy that combines the greatest profit, lowest drawdown, high percentage of profitable trades and the highest number of trades.
This feature is deployed in regular and portfolio back-testing and it also can be deployed by both genetic algorithm and exhaustive search optimization.
Optimization Report
Report displays the results of optimization and allows selecting the preferred output combinations by one or several criteria. For example, to find a strategy with the maximum Net Profit and minimum Max Drawdown, sort Net Profit data in ascending order and Drawdown in descending order.
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3D Optimization Graphs
3D Optimization Graph is a visual representation of how the strategy's parameters affect its trading performance. The 3D graph reveals the most robust parameter zones, and is a great tool
for avoiding over-optimization (curve-fitting). A strategy, the performance of which differs abruptly over an insignificant change in parameters, cannot be considered robust.
MultiCharts can superimpose several surfaces on a 3D graph. Superimposition can
be used to compare the efficiency of Genetic Optimization with that of Exhaustive Optimization, or the robustness of several different strategies. 3D surfaces can be drawn by
any criteria available in the Optimization Report, such as Net Profit, Percent Profitable, Max Drawdown, among other. As an aid to analysis, the relevant input and
output values are displayed when the mouse pointer is placed over a particular point on the graph's surface.
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June 29
We are starting beta-testing of MultiCharts 6.0 Beta 4.
September 10
We are glad to announce the release of MultiCharts 5.5!
September 10
Users of MultiCharts's can now subscribe to Barchart's real-time data feeds from $49/m.
February 10
MultiCharts received GOLD in Trade2Win's 2008 Members' Choice Awards.
Devember 8 Free MCFX PRO is now also available with Forex.com
