Progress Software

Backtesting

Backtesting, A Critical Foundation to Successful Algorithmic Trading Strategies

Effective backtesting can be a key component to building effective algorithmic trading strategies. By testing prospective algorithms on historical data, traders can better evaluate how well a strategy would have performed during different market periods, using real data as the test bed for the evaluation. Leveraging the output of backtesting, traders can refine their strategies, working out potential technical or theoretical flaws and conducting comparisons against alternate strategies. Effective backtesting can provide the foundation for successful deployment in live market conditions. Because traders may develop hundreds, even thousands, of trading algorithms that may run concurrently, the choice of the right technology for backtesting and development is critical. That's why capital market firms around the world have chosen the industry-leading solution for algorithmic trading – Progress® Apama®.

Progress Apama Delivers Innovative Tools for Backtesting

Apama, the market-leading platform for algorithmic trading, provides capital market firms with a rich environment to design, deploy and evolve algorithmic trading strategies. Progress® Apama® ESP Platform offers an advanced backtesting environment where traders can test and analyze new strategies, as well as audit those already deployed. Research Studio enables traders to backtest new strategies against selected time periods of market data captured in Apama Research Studio and EventStore, a bundled high performance time series data store. Strategists can stop, start, accelerate or decelerate data rates during replay, testing strategies against user-selected periods of market history. Traders can also perform comparative analyses by executing what-if scenarios - auditing existing history and strategies against potential ones.

The Market-Leading Algorithmic Trading Platform

Apama's backtesting capabilities are delivered as part of a comprehensive package for algorithmic trading. With Apama's patented Event Stream Processing platform, traders can monitor massive levels of market activity and respond within milliseconds. Unlike black box trading products, Apama's flexibility allows traders to leverage their unique trading techniques, rather than be confined to pre-configured trading strategies that are available to many, but offer differentiation for none. With Apama's Event Modeler, traders have a graphical environment for composition and deployment of trading strategies, empowering strategists with a point-and-click interface to assemble their strategies. Once developed, Apama's rich dashboard environment allows traders to monitor their strategies in real-time. Apama also provides a rich integration framework for connecting with market data feeds, order management systems, middleware technologies and databases.

Progress Software's other real-time solutions include software for business activity monitoring, complex event processing, data caching, data replication and data integration software.