I have a different solution to an issue I’ve seen raised many times in slightly different ways.
My specific case: To trade EOD, I use backtest mode with artificial bar to see if there is a trade for the next day. Many of my systems used mixed time frames including inweekly.
The issue: Specifically, when Friday, or Thursday and Friday are trading holidays, which means null data for those days, how does one use an artificial bar during backtest over the weekend to see if there is a trade on Monday?
I used to simply add a dummy entry to the symbol I was trading, such as SPY, for each of the holidays, putting the prior day value to eliminate the null and then I could generate a Monday trade. But then I switched from AmiQuote to Norgate, and because Norgate is using a plugin, I could no longer update the target symbol - the symbol is now in an external database. Ugh
So what to do?
I created an new symbol in Norgate, with a ticker $DUMMY. And I used the data wizard to upload SPY data to it. And with $DUMMY I am able to add dummy entries for the null days. Then, I use $DUMMY for the pad and align symbol. And voila, everything works (ie I can see my Monday trade again) when I put in the Monday date in the analysis window.
Somehow creating my own symbol gets around the external data update constraint. I have a sense of what is going on (mixed external/local and symbol control file interaction) but I’ll leave it to The Amibroker team to give the explanation if they’d like.
I hope others in this situation find this work around useful.
Best
Carl