eXcap  | 2007-03-20
Rina Review
I recently started looking at Portfoliostream by Rina systems. This is a $5000 product that you can try for a month for $500. I've tried pretty much all the features. This product provides a tradestation user with the ability to run the same strategy on a list of assets (stocks, futures). The way it works is you press the blue button in the strategy performance report window and the rina software, after some inital user prompting, cycles though the list and generates a concatenated strategy performance report. This basic functionality works most of the time but has problems when the list of assets gets too large. I have had a roughly 50/50 chance of bombing the when list is 500 (for testing on the S&P 500) for example. I have provided Rina with all the code from me they need to simulate the bug, but have not heard back from them on that.. But most of the time it works, every for a list as large as 100, and I have tried it on XP as well as Vista for stocks and futures. The next big feature in the software is money management. It can "retrade" your trades using a different dollar amount rule, for example fixed fraction of account net worth to a given asset. There are a number of rules to choose from that they have coded, such as Optimal f , fixed fractional with margin, and that Ryan Jones book rule. The documentation is very sparse on this set of features, too sparse in my opinion. The fixed fractional with margin money management is the one I typically study, and the documention on this is wrong (backwards - 2 in the documentation means 1/2 in the program). Beware that the documentation of this product and the product don't always agree, and I am disapointed that this is the case here as this is pretty crucial here. Also not well done are special cases associated with fixed fraction like when your strategy wants to trade X number assets at a fixed fraction of Y and X*Y>Buying Power. I have been trying to get them to fix this but no success yet. So I view the results using their money management as a good indication of what may have happened historically but not accurate to 100%. There is hidden risk in using their money management software. The other major feature I use is the monte carlo feature that mixes up the trading bars over the trading period and lets you know what would have happend if the bars occured in a different order in time. I like this part a lot and it seems to me to work correctly. I think this is pretty important for drawdown estimation. For my company the cost is not the issue as it recovered by converting one bad trade to a good trade and I think there is enough worth in the product to accomplish that if you are a program trader on a portfolio of stocks. The issue is trust. Do I trust the results coming from this software? Do I understand the documentation and the bugs and gaps in the documentation well enough to be using this software correctly? On the other hand, for portfolio trade concatenation, money management and the use of all symbols and data in tradestation, this seems to me to be the only game in town. I have worked in small software companies and know the difficulties in creating good software. I get the idea from conversations that rina has other priorities that impact the quality of this software. I also know that rina was not aware until recently that TS is talking about putting portfolio sw in TS 9. As a customer of both products, I would love to see both companies talking and working together on this so that the users get the best out of both companies.