Best Backtesting Software For Stocks and Options

Algorithmic trading is dominating the financial market space, and Trade Ideas is embracing it to give users perfect results. Trade Ideas combines its Oddsmaker backtesting functionality with its stock scanner to provide some of the best event-based stock alerts in the market. The OddsMaker is integrated with AI trading algorithms to provide quick but detailed historical data on a specified trade.

The Oddsmaker also allows you to optimize and refine your scans based on time of day, symbols, or stock price to analyze your strategies deeply. A reporting engine then analyses your trading strategy through different filters, enabling you to view subsets that work well and those that don't.

Trade Ideas helps you delve into the past performance of different trades to scrutinize your strategies' profitability and reliability. It also lets you determine the win rate, best pricing, profit margins, and compare the winners/losers. There's a color-coded calendar that shows daily metrics for individual trades. This makes it easy to define your position size, start equity, and add brokerage commission. 

This beginner-friendly software doesn't require one to know programming or scripting, unlike Trading View and QuantConnect. The software is also a time saver as you can run multiple backtests on your strategy and compare the results side-by-side. Likewise, you can leave Trade Ideas to do auto-trading (on select brokerages) for you based on your pre-defined parameters through the brokerage API.

Traders interested in social networking and accessing advanced charting tools will love Trading View. Unlike other backtesting software in this list, like TrendSpider, which has no mobile app, Trading View users can access its mobile-friendly and web-based interface. Through its social community, traders can share knowledge on trading strategies, market trends, and indicators. 

This cloud-based platform features multiple backtesting strategies and scripts. The exciting part is that most strategies are free, which explains why there are almost 200 million visits per month. But, users who want to access unique strategies, advanced screening and charting features must buy them. Additionally, the premium users get more customer support and access to real-time intraday data.

Trading View's intuitive design helps users view backtested data easily through its excellent charting system. The results are classified according to your strategy's performance (drawdown, net profit, profitable trades), past trading history, etc. 

The platform isn't beginner-friendly, as its advanced custom backtesting analysis requires one to know programming (Pine script). Don't worry if you lack programming knowledge; Trading View offers many educational resources. Pine Script helps you make custom backtests or indicators on specific data and time intervals, a unique feature you can't find on other stock backtesting tools.

A unique charting system allows users to access comprehensive tools. Primary users can view their strategy's results on a single chart, while premium subscribers can access up to 8 charts simultaneously. Either chart is customizable with technical indicators, symbols, and time frames. Users can adjust the time frames from a short period of just a minute to a long time of a month.

TrendSpider is an ideal backtesting choice for beginner traders since it doesn't require coding, as its features are 100% visual-interface-based. Being chart-based, the site shows detailed data from 1 minute, daily, weekly, to monthly, so traders can customize technical buy/sell rules. Moreover, traders can easily combine different portfolio chart patterns, indicators, volume, price action trading signals, etc. 

It provides up to 20 years of backdated data on extensive intraday data and daily time frame of trading strategies. The backtested results are presented in charts, making it easier for traders to differentiate between winners and losers. They can also view extra information like profitability, automated trend lines, drawdown, and win rate. This helps them to evaluate their trading strategy model's accuracy and decide whether to use it in real-time trading. 

If a trader sees that a particular strategy they had adopted isn't good, they can have a chance of optimizing it. They can make the necessary changes and run the new strategy through TrendSpider again. However, you can only run the strategy on one ticker symbol at any given time. The software will display the current and previous results side-by-side so you can make the final decision.

Finviz is a backtesting software that focuses on technical and fundamental aspects of stock trading. The technical filters include RSI, percentage change, moving averages, patterns volatility, and candlesticks. Fundamental filters analyze derived ratios or financials and can be filtered based on sales growth, institutional ownership, EPS growth, margins, etc. 

Once you have filtered your stocks according to the above filters, you can choose how you want to visualize their backtested results. Charts display technical patterns so you can quickly spot interesting trades. The valuation tab shows each ticker's derived ratios, while the overview tab shows basic data like sector or industry. Other filters include custom, snapshot, performance, and overview. 

The Finviz backtesting feature is offered to its elite premium users and provides 24 years of backtested data. Therefore, traders can get historical data on their strategies over the years and easily evaluate their performance. Though Finviz gives you a big picture of trades, ratios, and drawdowns, it fails to dig deeper into more details like Trading View or Trade Ideas. 

The Finviz platform has a user-friendly interface, thus allowing easy navigation for expert and beginner traders. There are various educational resources users can learn from to understand how to operate the software and get information on stock market trading. The resources include helpful articles, definitions of financial terms, and tutorials.

QuantConnect ranks among the newest backtesting software for algorithmic and quantitative-based traders. It also includes volume data, price points, and fundamental data. Moreover, it's an excellent platform for traders who wish to test, develop, and execute customized trading strategies. Users can access seamless broker integration, multi-asset support, and high-fidelity backtesting. 

The software operates on an algorithmic open-source trading engine (LEAN) that offers traders a combination of power and flexibility. The LEAN engine can be run on-premise or in the cloud. Being open source, users can modify the engine if need be. 

 It's important to note that backtesting, trading, and creating strategies with QuantConnect require experience in coding. Through QuantConnect's backtesting, users get terabytes of financial data for free to backtest their strategy accurately, but the tests run with minimal coding. 

Users can directly execute live trades on the platform through provided broker integrations like TD Ameritrade and InteractiveBrokers. The parameter optimization tool enables traders to run hundreds and thousands of backtests to evaluate their trading strategies.

Tickeron is a unique trading platform that combines human intelligence, thanks to its community of traders and artificial intelligence. This enables users to compare human versus machine output. Tickeron incorporates AI to generate trading ideas with its pattern search engine. 

The AI-driven algorithms can spot up to 40 real-time stock chart patterns. You can choose your preferred pattern from the list, and the system will filter it further to match crypto, forex, or stocks. The patterns are divided into bearish patterns for short-term trades and bullish patterns for long-term trades. 

Tickeron's real-time pattern recognition is helpful for day or swing traders since it prioritizes market timing. Traders can select the best patterns from the suggestions in "Today's Top Ranked Patterns." Icon. This is a great time saver for traders looking for possible trade setups.

Still, on patterns, Tickeron has an AI confidence level to evaluate trade predictions and signals. The main pointers are a pattern's success rate, stock history, and current market direction. It doesn't end there; traders can have access to previous predictions to analyze if AI did a better job with the current performance of specific stocks. This level of clarity helps traders to make the right decisions.

Conclusion

Backtesting software helps traders evaluate the profitability of their strategy and how they can optimize it to reduce risks. The above tools are the best backtesting software in the current financial markets. Traders should adopt a tool that suits their strategies to make well-informed trading decisions and stay on top of the game. 

Trade Ideas is our overall best backtesting software pick as it offers AI-based backtesting, an efficient charting system, permits auto trading, and supports paper trading.

Trading View and QuantConnect are the best backtesting software with free versions. TrendSpider and Finviz are great tools for long-term investors since they backtest data for over 20 years.