Tomasz: Thank you for taking the time to share this. Unfortunately, I have a lot of studying to do with the custom backtester to even begin to see if this can help me. I was successful in running the code and looking at the output, but the output seems like it needs a bunch more processing, either within the backtester (which I do not know how to do yet) or outside the backtester (in Excel) which is what I am trying to avoid (for labor savings). Here is what I specifically am trying to get to....... What I need to achieve is equivalent to using the Excel Function RANK, which allows the specification of a Range (a column for say, stochastics for 100 funds), then getting in another column the Ordinal Position of that ticker relative to all others for the result of stochastics. Then, another column might have an indicator, say RSI14, and another column using RANK that shows the Ordinal Position of each RSI value for all tickers. I then take a final column and say, sum the two ordinal values for each ticker to get a Master Ranking column. My situation is more complex than this (more columns and a more complex combining method) but this is the basic idea. This can all be done in Excel, but a tremendous labor saving step is to accomplish it all in AB. Imagine trying to do this on 1000s of stocks on a daily or even hourly basis. Can you whip up an AFL function called RANK which operates exactly like the Excel RANK function? <smile> The backtester "seems" like it might be able to do this, although because of inexperience, I am not sure. You once said "AFL/AB can do anything". If you tell me it can do this, I will dive in and try and learn enough about the various commands and usage in order to make it happen. Can it do it? Ken
_____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tomasz Janeczko Sent: Friday, May 09, 2008 4:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [amibroker] Greybeard Topic - Sorting and Ranking Arrays Ken, Sorting and ranking is part of portfolio backtest. You can use this process not only to do actual backtest but also to output ranking/sorting results. All you need is to assign your score to PositionScore variable. Then, run backtest. All your signals will be ranked and sorted according to absolute value of position score. The code below shows how. It also generates "myoutput.txt" Comma Separated Values (CSV) file with Symbol, Score lines. Lines are in chronological order, within same date/time the lines are sorted according to absolute value of score. It also outputs the same into DebugView. Buy=1; Sell=0; SetBacktestMode( backtestRegularRaw ); PositionScore = 100 - RSI(); // anything you like (will be sorted/ranked according to absolute value of pos score) SetCustomBacktestProc(""); OutputFileName = "myoutput.txt"; if( Status("action" ) == actionPortfolio ) { bo = GetBacktesterObject(); bo.PreProcess(); dt = DateTime(); fh = fopen( OutputFileName, "w" ); fputs( "Symbol, Score\n", fh ); for( i = 0; i < BarCount; i++ ) { strdt = DateTimeToStr( dt[ i ] ); Line = "\nDate : " + strdt + "\n"; _TRACE( Line ); fputs( Line, fh ); for( sig = bo.GetFirstSignal(i); sig; sig = bo.GetNextSignal(i) ) { Line = sig.Symbol + "," + sig.PosScore + "\n"; _TRACE( Line ); fputs( Line, fh ); } bo.ProcessTradeSignals( i ); } fclose( fh ); bo.PostProcess(); } Best regards, Tomasz Janeczko amibroker.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Close <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, May 09, 2008 7:38 PM Subject: [amibroker] Greybeard Topic - Sorting and Ranking Arrays It has been fun to search the yahoo archives back to 2002 and see names of a lot of the original folks who got on the Amibroker bandwagon back in the early days, many of whom are no longer around (at least not posting like they used to). Boy, how the program has evolved and improved over these many years. I was looking back there in the archives for messages on the Osaka Plugin (which is still on my hard drive since 2002 but which I have never used). Maybe now...... I have a need to take a watchlist and position rank several columns of calculations and determine the postion rank of the ticker for that calculation; then do the same for another column (calculation), get the position rank for that additional column, and then combine the position ranking numbers for the columns for each ticker, sort of to get a Master ranking parameter. My question is: what new features in AB might help accomplish this? Surely the Osaka Plugin (2002 vintage) is not the only way to do what I want. I have not really studied nor used Static and Dynamic variables---is this the set of commands that I would use with looping to get position ranks of a watchlist? I did find and just tested some code from the Library which used just these tools (variables and looping) and it was painfully slow and would not really work for the application I have in mind. I am uncertain if the code in that example can be modified to make it faster. Any suggestions about this age-old question/problem, given the many advances of Amibroker since 2002?? Thanks for any ideas (the more specific the better). Ken No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 8.0.100 / Virus Database: 269.23.14/1425 - Release Date: 5/9/2008 12:38 PM
