For you really old timers, you may remember back to the days of Prodigy when FastWays was first being developed, and then FastCalc, FastTools, FastRube, FastBreak, etc. evolved largely from bulletin board discussions. Now there are a myriad of add-on products for FastTrack, but few have kept up with evolving techniques and have been revised to reflect changing methods and markets. FastWays has taken the lead again by adding new analysis not available with any other product—not just any other product for FastTrack, but with any other product period!
As far as we are aware, no other program separates correlation analysis into runs and calculates correlations and betas within trending periods. Many of you are familiar with maximum draw down which is calculated from peak to bottom, and what FastWays does is calculate the correlation/beta within these periods and from the bottoms to the tops. Why is this important? Simple.
The fundamental assumption behind any correlation strategy is to that one investment can be identified as trending but another (higher performing) correlated investment can be used as the actual investment. But what if the high beta is for downward trending periods rather than upward trending periods?
For sake of argument, assume that an investment is highly correlated with DJ-30 and has a beta of 1.2. If
the DJ-30 is trending up (we wish) you might consider investing in that
investment because with a beta exceeding 1 you would expect it to have an even bigger rise. But if the high beta was for downward trending periods you may well not get that extra return you expected. Now you can compute betas within the trending periods so that you will better know what to expect.
Okay, the programming side of me won over the side to get the product out. As I was putting the finishing touches on this revision, I thought of another useful idea. Why not look at the percentage overlap of the runs?
Here FastWays calculates the runs for the index and the investment and sees what percentage of time they are in the same trending pattern. Simple, but hopefully an additional useful piece of information.
We have all complained about whipsaws and too many trades—to combat the whipsaws and excessive trades FastWays has added a confirmation methodology that can be used with all indicators. You can delay the transaction until the signal is confirmed for N days, and you can even select the confirmation method while FastWays is finding the best number of days to delay the transaction! You can set the confirmation to be consistently above/below the transaction point during the confirmation period or you can check only at the end of the confirmation period. For example, if the confirmation period is 4 days and a signal is generated on Friday. Instead of assuming the trade on Monday the trade would only occur if the signal was consistent for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday or under method 2 if the signal was the same as of Thursday (could double whipsaw in between). This is a real whipsaw beater and actually increases the returns too in many cases, particularly for stocks and volatile funds.
A whipsaw is simply a signal that is reversed within a very short period of time. Near the end of producing this revision it occurred to me that particularly in this market we all are trying to minimize whipsaws, but were not even calculating the measure. We were using surrogates such as the switches per year, but not measuring directly the number of whipsaws. Why not measure whipsaws directly?
FastWays now allows you to set the number of days to determine whether or not a reversal is considered a whipsaw, and calculates the percentage of trades that are reversed within the period. For example, if you specify five (5) days and a signal is reversed before 5 days have passed it is added to the whipsaw count and is used to calculate the percentage of whipsaws. As far as we know, no other program offers this calculation for FastTrack data. [The number of days is set under option 6.1]
FastWays can calculate the best buy/sell levels for RSI, custom oscillators, and can even find the best combination of two oscillators. For those who like oscillators, Version 3 has added a lot of horsepower.
FastWays now maintains signals, and alerts with a NEW SIGNAL box whenever a signal has been generated since the last time FastWays was run. Even if a new signal has not been generated, you can examine the numeric and visual position of the indicators through option 4.2.
The essence of another popular method is rotation among the top performing funds/stocks, with a fixed period of analysis. FastWays expands that analysis by using three user-defined periods, and has both numeric and graphical analysis side by side.
But, it important to note that this is not a mechanical method, judgment still must be exercised, and it is not for the weak of heart. But, for those of you who are young enough to be aggressive, this has a lot of potential. In fact, it is the beginning step in an analysis being developed as a separate module.
Other programs have limited analysis of changes in AccuTrack, but FastWays extends that by allowing three user-defined periods, and whatever indicators you wish. You can even select three different sets of parameters. FastWays provides a summation index of all of the settings that are positive. Those not proficient at writing their own routines will find this tool a useful substitute.
FastWays now allows you to search not only for the best investments for a given signal, but to search for the best signal for given investments. A
combined analysis allows you to search for the best signals for a whole family of funds.
The above is just one of many new options.
In all analyses that have funds listed (such as the family analyses), left-clicking on a fund provides its annual return a) for the life of the fund and b) within the analysis period. The standard deviations are also calculated for these periods.
In all analyses that have funds listed (such as the family analyses), right-clicking on a fund provides
a graph of the prices since inception and/or within the analysis period. An
index fund can also be plotted with the data to show relative performance.
There are over one hour of video tutorials for the various procedures. Thus,
even though FastWays has an intuitive menu system, you now have detailed video
instructions to further explain how to use FastWays.
Any analysis can now be saved to a comma separated file (CSV) format, and later reloaded.
The screens for three dimensional analysis, the most complicated, now load much faster.
FastWays allows you to quickly search a family of funds for further analysis. You can easily apply any indicator settings to all members of a family, you can use surrogate signals on a family, and you can use signal files on whole families. These families can be those found in FastTrack or those created for FastWays.
But, Version 3 has taken the lead again by adding the ability to match all pairs within a family! Yep, since 1993 users have been wanting to easily search for the best possible pair, and now you can. For example, with a four fund family, the following pairs would result:
(1,2)
(1,3)
(1,4)
(2,1)
(2,3)
(2,4)
(3,1)
(3,2)
(3,4)
(4,1)
(4,2)
(4,3)
FastWays could calculate the results for all of these combinations. However, to more efficient, since the "reversed" results are also calculated,
for AccuTrack you could shorten the analysis by omitting the "duplicate" pairs. That is, you could drop (2,1), (3,1), (3,2), (4,1), (4,2), and (4,3) from the analysis. For large families, this would substantially decrease the number of iterations that would be necessary.