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Historical Simulator Plug-in
Introduction
Video Transcript
In this Track 'n Trade Pro tutorial example, I want to highlight for you the accounting tab plug-in. That's the little green dollar calculator right over here in the upper left hand corner. This is what we call our control panel, that's the green dollar sign in our control panel. If you click on it, it will expand, you say it's my account. Again, this is part of the accounting and simulator plug-in, you won't have this unless you have that plug-in.
What it does, is it allows us to go through and track our profits and losses on our simulated trades. You'll notice the first one is the accounting date, and because we are a time machine, we can go forward and backward in time and trade historical simulated trades of historical markets.
If you wanted to for example to become an expert corn trader, you could go back to 1980 and begin trading corn forward, all the way to 1994, or whatever date that is today. You can track the market day by day, and then see what the market does and how it reacts.
Each market has kind of its own personality. If you wanted to become an expert in any particular market, this is a great way for you to go back and practice your trading techniques. We have that listed as the Accounting Date. Of course, that will change with your market as you move it forward and back and play the markets forward and back.
We have our Open Order Profit and Loss, Closed Order Profit and Loss, and Order Commissions. So this first section is for orders. This is for placing contract orders on the chart, and simulating those transactions and this is where you would calculate your profits and losses.
This section is Open Option Profit and Loss, Closed Option Profit and Loss and Option Commission. So if you're simulating trading options, this is where the profits and losses of your options would show up.
Notice that we have futures up on top and options underneath. Then, we have a Subtotal section that subtotals those two together. So if your'e doing strategies where both buying and selling and underlying futures contract with a contract order and you're also playing options at the same time, you would calculate simultaneously the profits and losses from both options and futures in this accounting window over here. Then we would give ourselves a subtotal, or a total of these different profits and losses based on the two profits and losses of the underlying futures or options.
We have our Account Balance. Our Margin Requirements, the Available Funds in our account. You'll notice that we have a Deposit Account up here, so we can make deposits into our account, or we can make withdraws into our account. We can place orders directly into our account, right here.
We also have a Trade Log, which comes through and shows you the different logs of all the different trades that you've made from any specific date, and how they effected your account.
We have our Current Positions whether we're long or short, in any specific commodity. Then, we have our Call Options and Put Options. Whether we have a buy or a sell, or a buy or a sell on individual contracts.
You'll notice on this first column is just for this contract, and then the total column includes all contracts or all commodities that we're trading within our book. If we have 5 contracts within our book and each one of those five contracts has an order on it with a profit and loss, they would show up over here in the totals. In the center one would just be the totals for this contract that we're looking at.
Now for this example I want to show you just quickly how we can place these orders in here and we're going to watch the profits and losses calculate. I'm going to come up here and I'm going to just quickly grab a market order, I'm going to buy one market, okay. I'm going to step that forward. It wants us to make a deposit, so we go ahead and with our time machine, we do that by going $5,000.00. We're going to say we made that deposit on November 1st. We hit Okay. Notice that shows up over here in our accounting window that we made a deposit of $5,000.00 on 11/1/2003. Then on 11/26 where we placed our simulated order we buy 1 market and it was filled at $245.50. You'll notice up here where we calculating our profits and losses, we now have an open order at $87.50 with an $87.50 profit. We paid a $20.00 commission and we have an order subtotal of $67.50 profit.
As that market moves forward, you can see that our profits and losses advance or decline. You'll notice down here we have our orders listed. Now, let's come in here and do a call option. I'm going to buy 1 255 call. I'm going to say Okay. As we step that one forward, that one is filled. Now, you'll notice that we have a profit and loss setup within our options section of our calculator of our accounting tab. We have profits and losses for our orders. Then we have a subtotal where everything is being calculated together. As we advance these markets forward, you'll be able to see these profits and losses accumulate independently as totals. Now we have different prices for our underlying futures, we have our options calculated separately and then we have a subtotal that calculates them both together.
As we move that forward, we either increase or decrease in value. You come down here, and you can see that we are, our current position is, we are long 1 contract, and our call options, we have buy 1. We have a buy 1, in both this contract and in the total.
Now, if we went over to another contract and started trading, we would have - and in the total contract that would be able to be seen at all times, no matter what contract we're looking at. In this contract we can see just the information for this contract. Down in the bottom window you'll notice down in here, you can see where we made our deposit. You can see our deposit in here, you can see any orders that we've placed. Here's an order that we've placed: 11/26/2003. Buy 1 at the market and it was filled. Here's our other, here's our call option, let's spread this open just a little bit more. You can see buy 1 255.00 call for 450.00. That's in there, and we can sort by date. Go ahead and sort those by date, by clicking the date header. You can highlight that over there.
Let's say we want to come over here, and see that buy 1 call 9? Or the buy 1 market, if we click on that red triangle, notice that it highlights over here in this window for us. If we have a big long list of orders, and we're not sure which one we're looking at, we can just simply click on it and it will highlight it over here in this window for us.