Investors FastTrack

Quality Data for Investing Strategies

Step 2 Details

Basics

The trade tab is “where the rubber meets the road.” All other tabs are devoted to investigating, perfecting, testing, etc the historical performance of a strategy. The trade tab is designed to give the buy and sell recommendations of how to execute those strategies.

Step 1

trade step 1

Step 1 is easy enough to understand. You dial in the parameters of a strategy. These are the same parameters you’ll see on the compare and trade optimizer tab.

Step 2

In step 2, is where you enter your current portfolio, or what FT Cloud calls a “snapshot.” FT Cloud uses information in step 2 to derive the sell recommendations.

There are two ways to generate step 2 values.

Default Settings

trade default Step 2

The default setting is above. In the default setting you manually enter your snapshot. So, you enter the ticker symbols of the funds, stocks, or etfs you own, then enter the share count or asset value of each ticker.

This data is used to derive the sell recommendations.

  1. Show or hide advanced step 2 information
  2. Use these buttons to save or load your snapshots
  3. Each snapshot has a snapshot date. This is the date your of the data you entered. So, if you are looking at your positions on the close of March 31. Your snapshot date will be March 31.
  4. The refresh button calculates each assets value for the snapshot date. The value = closing price of snapshot date * # of shares owned.

Advanced Settings

trade advanced Step 2

  1. Show or hide advanced step 2 information
  2. Toggle between default “snapshot” setting or “model”
  3. Step 1 includes information relevant to creating the trade recommendations, but is missing key parameters needed to repeat the process when creating an equity curve. These missing parameters are display here.
  4. Recalculate the equity curve
  5. The equity curve positions on the snapshot date and the data used for the “sell” recommendations

The advanced “model” section of Step 2 displays the snapshot date of an equity curve calculated using the Trade Tab parameters.

Said a different way, the “model” section uses the step 1 information in combination with the addition details parameters in step 2, to calculate an equity curve exactly as the compare tab would. After we calculate the equity curve, we choose display the positions of the equity curve for the snapshot date entered above.

What is the purpose of this?

This can be very very useful in auditing the compare tab. Its an easy shortcut to display the same information across both tabs.

Additionally, when ranking by sharpe or FT Alpha, the basis is used very important. In the Compare tab, the basis of FT alpha and the sharpe can be the equity curve itself. So, in order to produce the same results in both tabs, we must also use the equity curve as the basis here in the trade tab.