Tradewell Review – Inside this backtesting platform

Tradewell is a backtesting platform for stock, forex, futures and cryptocurrency strategy. It offers up to 100 years of historical data and data visualizations to help you identify indicators that correlate well with the stock price.

Tradewell takes a unique approach to backtesting, allowing you to delve deeper into individual technical indicators and alternative data metrics rather than evaluating entire strategies. In our Tradewell review, we'll explain how this system works and help you decide if it's right for you.

Tradewell Pricing Options

Tradewell offers three plans: Free, Plus, and Professional.

The Free plan provides access to Tradewell's backtesting tools with up to five years of historical data. It includes most of the popular technical indicators for building your strategy and access to all Tradewell data visualizations.

The Plus plan costs $30 per month and provides up to 20 years of historical data, including fundamental options and market breadth data. It also gives you access to many special indicators created by Tradewell.

The Professional plan costs $60 per month and offers up to 100 years of historical data, including advanced options data such as call ratios and implied volatility metrics.

Treadwell Features

Datasets

Tradewell offers up to 100 years of historical data for stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, forex, options, futures, and cryptocurrencies. Stock data includes more than 65,000 indexes in the US and Chinese markets. Advanced options data (available with the Professional plan) includes realized implied volatility spreads, implied volatility term structure, put-call ratios, and implied volatility x-delta.

Tradewell also has alternative datasets such as:

• Google Trends search data
• Crude oil production and gas prices
• Government debt and gold reserves
• Macroeconomic data (inflation rates, unemployment rates, interest rates)
• Investment Manager's Feelings
• Dark pool trading volume

Backtesting

Tradewell's backtesting tool is slightly different from other backtesting software in that it does not calculate the historical performance of a fully configured trading strategy. Instead, it enables you to evaluate one indicator or alternative data type at a time to see how it can be used in your trading strategy.

For example, let's say you want to check whether a trading strategy using a Relative Strength Index (RSI) below 35 as an entry point for Apple stock will be effective. You can then create an RSI backtest with a customizable holding period — let's use 20 days.

Tradewell will then display visualizations showing the historical return for each 20-day trading period starting when the RSI crosses below 35. This average return is compared to the historical average return for all other 20-day trading periods. A scatter plot enables you to visually compare the size of average returns for 20-day signal periods versus all other 20-day periods.

This approach can be confusing because it does not necessarily tell you about a trading strategy, but rather it tells you the potential usefulness of one indicator as part of a trading strategy. However, it can be very useful if you are in the early stages of building a trading strategy and want to know which indicators to include.

Tradewell offers a summary table that allows you to compare results over different trading periods (for example, 10 or 60 days instead of 20 days). This can be useful for improvement.

Tradewell also allows you to convert indicators and data metrics for deeper analysis. For example, instead of testing the Relative Strength Index (RSI), you can test the rate of change of the RSI. Other conversions enable you to backtest the moving average or percentage of the measure during the backtest period. This gives you more flexibility to look beyond absolute indicator values ​​and gain insights that are not possible with most backtesting or technical analysis tools.

Customization and planning

Overall, using Tradewell was a bit confusing. It takes several steps to go from your account dashboard to the backtesting tool, and there are many filters within the backtesting module that are not well documented. You also can't export data from your backtests to create your own visualizations in Excel.

However, you have the ability to save backtests and come back to them later. You can also add annotations and save visualizations that show backtest results.

Nuances of the Tradewell platform

Tradewell's backtesting tool is unique, and perhaps not what traders expect when looking for backtesting software. Instead of helping you evaluate and improve a particular trading strategy, it focuses on evaluating the correlation between a single indicator and the price movements of a single indicator.

This can be useful if you want to evaluate a wide range of indicators to see which ones work best for trading a particular indicator. However, Tradewell does not offer a way to test entries and exit conditions involving multiple indicators. Therefore, it is necessary to use Tradewell with another backtesting software, such as Trade Ideas, TradingView or Thinkorswim, to fully formulate your strategy.

The main difference between Tradewell and other backtesting tools is that Tradewell includes alternative data. This can be a big attraction for traders who want to think outside the box and build strategies that do not rely entirely on popular technical indicators. However, Tradewell does not offer a way to build and test strategies that include alternative data sets and technical indicators.

What type of trader is Tradewell suitable for?

Tradewell is best suited for traders who want to use backtesting to identify technical indicators or alternative data sets that correlate with a stock price. It can be helpful to take the first steps towards building a complex trading strategy. However, you should be aware that you will need to move from Tradewell to a more traditional backtesting software to fully test your strategy.

Tradewell is particularly suitable if you want to analyze how macroeconomic factors or options trading data correlate with stock prices. This data is not supported by other backtesting software and may be difficult to analyze on your own.