I believe that Portfolio123 has a great track record of server uptime. However, if it ever so happens that it would be down for some time, it might really hurt my investment process.
Hence I’ve been wondering: have others thought of having some sort of back-up plan? Not so much to backtest your strategies, but more so to rank stocks so you could update your live strategy manually at least for some time in case of a downtime.
I might be accused of being a bit paranoid here, but I like thinking about these things before they might ever actually happen.
How often are you trading? I have 100-200% annual turnover so I would probably just do nothing. In my case doing nothing is probably the safest option.
Yes, that would be my the go-to option also currently.
The strategy I currently use has an annual turnover of around 500%.
Downtime maybe is not the biggest worry, it’s more about P123 ever stopping its services. I wouldn’t have a good alternative then. That would hurt my investment process and maybe even more importantly, I’m starting to get some emotional reliance on P123, because it’s just so interesting. I would have a hard time without it or without something similar.
I don’t worry at all.
95% of all “catastrophic expectations” never happen.
So why worry?
And life is full of opportunities (all the time).
P123 is one such opportunity. Seize it.
If it is not available (anymore) another opportunity will arise.
Zero worries on my side.
I actually used another service called Investors Edge. They shut down because they couldn’t reach a favorable agreement with Factset. I ended up basically unwinding all my positions and came over to Portfolio123.
You can definitely do by yourself what you do on Portfolio123 but it might be more expensive to get the quality of data and definitely more time consuming.
There’s always the risk of what you have stated, but Portfolio123 has been around awhile. I guess it depends more so on whether the data can be acquired for a reasonable cost and what Marco will do with the business over the long term.
Before I joined P123 ages ago, I used ms excel, writing visual basic scripts and downloaded data from various free web sites, even wrote a simple interface to send orders to IB; P123 is much much easier to use, although back-testing is date limited. I still use excel for some of the simpler, technical back-tests if I want a much longer (basically unlimited) back-test interval…
At this moment you have three other alternatives to
P123, currently without exception P123 is numero uno,
I have tested the others as future backup should an IB come calling with a bag of swag to then keep the spoils for in-house usage, for various reasons the alternatives do not compare to P123, should the unthinkable happen, the alternatives shall suffice to continue the investment process.
As far as I know, of these only Stock Rover allows multifactor ranking, but it doesn’t do backtesting and has only 10 years of historical data. When it comes to ranking and backtesting, P123 is the only game in town.
My personal take is to spend my time trying to promote P123 every chance I get on LinkedIn and SeekingAlpha and had even started a video tutorial series. I don’t know how much effect it is having but I think that if there were a few dozen of us all trying the same it would help P123 to keep chugging forward happily long-term.
(1) promote P123 where I can
(2) check out stock rover and other ranking products
(3) backtest a simple but effective rankingsystem with P123 based on fundamentals only and
(4) based on (2 and 3) create a ranking sytem with other ranking products ánd (based on 3) create one myself locally using fundamentals data from an other source (I like a Tiingo based on price and quality of the data) to always have something to fall back on.
or without something similar.