I sent an email to Stockfetcher.com asking them if they had plans to
expand their backtesting capabilities. The following is their response.
The inability to backtest more than two years, and the inability to backtest
during a bear market is a fatal flaw. I can only guess that either their
subscribers or the company itself does not truly understand how useless their
service is without allowing backtesting over a much greater span of time.
I am not-so-secretly hoping that if enough potential subscribers or current
subscribers ask for expanded backtesting capability, that Stockfetcher will give
it greater consideration.
***Edit*** I should qualify what I mean by "useless." I am seeking development
of a longterm trend following system. Not being able to test over a long period
of time makes Stockfetcher useless to me. However, for short term swing trades
of a few days to a few weeks, their backtesting service may be very valuable.
If cornered, I would still argue that stocks will move differently 3 weeks after
an entry point in a bear market than they will during a bull market. Perhaps
Stockfetcher could include 2000-2001 in the periods covered by backtesting to
provide their users a downtrending market to test strategies. I would expect
that anyone testing short strategies is consistently stymied testing from
2002-2007.
Hi,
Thank you for the feedback. StockFetcher does limit a single back-test
to 2 years; however, the period covered by StockFetcher backtesting is
2002-2007 (i.e. you can test over any 2 year period in that range.)
Due to various performance requirements, at this time we do not have
plans to extend our backtesting period beyond the existing 5 years.
If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to send us
an email.
Thank you,
Tom
StockFetcher.com Support
Vestyl Software, L.L.C.
