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Regarding CML... I guess it boils down to what you are looking for. If you are looking for a quick and easy to use backtester that identifies mostly directional plays (with the backdrop of a long running bull market) then its a good tool. Although you'll still find some bugs when you dig into trade iteration details. If you are looking for volatility based, non-directional backtesting tool, then not so much. There is no way to factor in trade entry/exit criteria based on volatility based stats. I still have a subscription to CML, but I doubt I use it enough to warrant keeping it longer term. Note that there is nothing wrong with the directional plays suggested if that is what you primarily use it for. My personal preference is to limit my options trading to non-directional volatility based trades (I have enough directional in 401k, so I don't want my options trading to be simply more of the same), and the SO trades work as evidenced by the winning trade percentages. So, in my case, I need the RV charting tools for making trade decisions but I don't need CML for that.

I canceled my CML subscription last summer after using it for a couple of days for exactly same reasons. Their backtesting is not very convincing, most of the recommendations they publish are bullish trades - with bull market not surprising this works. The backtester itself is very basic, lacks much of the functionality real option backtester needs. And, as @krisbee mentioned most of CML research is freely available online anyway.

I had cml subscription for few days and cancelled it. I really don't need it as I do very rarely directional trade. all the posted CML URL of backtesting that I posted are posted by someone in twitter feed. I validate it by seeing the gamma gain using volatilityhq website and take my own decision on when to enter and exit. So far I could succeed appx more than 95% on that. more over cmlviz news URL of all potential newsletter is public. u can access it anytime. One of those trade is recently Kim did on pre earnings strangle.

I agree with the above. I cancelled my subscription as well for the same reasons. I write my own code for backtesting so don't really need a nice UI. Backtesting is seductive since you can engineer strategies that look insanely profitable. But in reality you're just overfitting to the data, *especially* with directional trades - it is a fiendishly difficult problem since you *want* to believe what the backtesting is telling you. To backtest correctly, you need to correct for overfitting, which means testing your strategies over out-of-sample data, and select data from a wide variety of market conditions. It's always a rude awakening when you see your insanely profitable strategy collapse upon meeting out-of-sample data (including in your own trading account). I've definitely experienced this first-hand. I think there's definitely a lot of validity to momentum trading, but it only works until it the day it stops. I think the trick is recognizing when that day has arrived, and stopping these trades. For me, that pretty much sums up January, since it was such an unusual month given the recent past, at least in terms of the short-volatility trades like the SVXY and VXX strategies. I, like @Yowster, also did a number of post-earnings condors, which worked very well until the very recent past, so I've drastically reduced my position size with these trades. Again, they all look fabulous in a backtest... In times like these I think it's best to be long volatility and market-neutral until some of the dust settles. I've also been increasing my commodity trades, since these are not particularly correlated to US equities. The beauty of options is that you can profit from any market condition in any market that has sufficient liquidity so it gives you that sort of flexibility.

@RapperT That should be fixed now on the website.