6. Summary

TREE offers a powerful, flexible, carefully-thought-out environment for the design and testing of automated trading systems. Its advantages include:

• Support for stepwise construction of very complex systems. Organizing a trading system as hierarchical blocks helps to keep complexity manageable.
• Accurate historical testing. Critical errors that can invalidate a historical test are prevented by TREE's design.
• Easy, reliable transition from testing to live trading. Since the same code is used for both purposes, there are never errors in converting a back-tested algorithm for realtime use.
• Supreme extensibility and modifiability. To illustrate this, we showed how automatic parameter optimization and asset allocation among multiple trading strategies can be built up from ``spare parts'' using TREE's general-purpose facilities. Features like these can be user-constructed and user-modified in TREE.

The authors know of no other financial trading software that comes close to the capabilities of TREE.

Copyright 1997, Structured Software Systems, Inc.