Tag Archives: Backtesting

Our Competitor Pair Trading Lab Has Closed: What PTL Users Can Do Now

October 22, 2026 11:30 am |
Pair Trading Lab alternative: Ultimate Alpha 3 pairs trading software

Pair Trading Lab shut down on 1 October 2026. Its website, pair database, backtester and analyzer are now offline. If you used PTL to find and test pairs, your research tools have gone, but your options haven’t.

We have built pairs trading software since 2008, so here is a plain guide for PTL users: what still works, what doesn’t, and the routes open to you now, including ours.

What still works, and what’s gone

According to Pair Trading Lab’s closure notice, PTL Trader keeps running. Everything that fed it new research has gone.

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Pairs Trading Example: The Vegas Pair That Kept Paying for 5 Years

September 13, 2026 1:35 pm |

Want a real pairs trading example instead of theory? Here’s one straight from our platform: Hilton Grand Vacations (HGV) and MGM Resorts (MGM). Two Las Vegas-rooted leisure stocks. One quietly reliable trading relationship.

The numbers: 12 trades, 12 winners

We ran a 5-year end-of-day backtest at $5,000 per leg. The results speak plainly:

  • 12 completed trades — every one profitable
  • Net profit: $3,122 after $258 in commissions
  • Average profit per trade: $260
  • Maximum drawdown: just 4.02%

The equity curve is a staircase, not a rollercoaster.

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Market-Neutral Pair Trading in Action: May 2026 Top 50 USA Stock Pair Stars

May 11, 2026 4:52 pm |
market-neutral pair trading

Most retail trading strategies depend on direction — and direction is the one thing nobody can predict consistently. By contrast, market-neutral pair trading offers an alternative: trades constructed not on whether a market rises or falls, but on the relationship between two fundamentally related assets. As a result, when that relationship temporarily diverges, mean reversion offers a measurable, repeatable edge.

Your Shortcut to Market-Neutral Pair Trading Success

This May, after another quarter of research, recalibration, and statistical validation, we are releasing the May 2026 Vintage of our Top 50 USA Stock Pair Stars.

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Kalman Filters vs. PairTrade Finder®

March 26, 2026 3:38 pm |
Why We Keep It Simple (On Purpose) Kalman filters

From time to time, experienced traders reach out and ask:

“Why doesn’t PairTrade Finder® use a Kalman filter to calculate dynamic hedge ratios?”

It’s a fair question. Kalman filters are widely used in quantitative finance and are often presented as a more advanced way to trade pairs.

So this post explains our thinking clearly.

PairTrade Finder® is designed to capture most of the statistical edge—without the complexity that often reduces real-world performance.

In practice, as a rule we seek to target a platform that delivers 80% of the benefit of institutional grade models with around 20% of the complexity.

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