Any free financial strategy tests on historical data?

[Grizwold]

I saw a commercial today from Fidelity where they advertised a program that helps you test your financial strategies. It seems that you put in all sorts of criteria for picking securities and different market orders according to your financial strategy. The program then tests your strategy by using historic market results to see how successful your strategy is (or was). It gives indication of what kind of potential your strategy has for the future. However, I do not use Fidelity and I'm wondering if there are any other programs that can do this? Preferably free.

Sincerely,
Clark

[pig4bill]

There are a bunch of them that do backtesting based on T/A systems. Anything that's free is likely to be very rudimentary. I don't know how they can backtest based on fundamentals. How would they know what buy price to use?

[Chrisman886]

Good luck on the free part. I have used TradeStation and Wealth Lab but like TradeStation better.

[Grizwold]

Thanks for the replies. I do not expect a good program like this for free. Really I am looking for a stand-alone type program with this kind of testing, rather than having to open an account with a new broker. I have one at e*trade already for low activity investors because I don't have much to invest yet. Advertisements for so many cool investment analysis programs all seem to require creating a new trading account. "We have all these great programs for all people that open active trading accounts at our brokerage."

Are there any powerful financial analysis programs that require only a one time fee and is not affiliated with any brokers? (Hopefully the program includes the kind of backtesting I originally posted about.)

This also makes me wonder how many active traders have multiple brokers? Is it quite advantageous to have several brokers? As soon as I have some real income, I will be trading a lot, and I'd like to be prepared.

Sincerely,
Clark

[kimchi]

I think Fidelity offer Wealth Lab pro for US/Canadian customers for free with certain accounts. This might be what you are looking at.

Wealth Lab developer costs $650 outside the US, so it may be worth a look.

[pig4bill]

Yeah, but what good is a one-time fee, which means a one-time data download? Without current prices it's all just mental mastrubation. Metastock and TC 2000 (or whatever it's called now) are a couple examples of low-intensity (compared to TS) backtesting tools.