Thank you for the information. In the future I will not post phone numbers, email addresses, and urls. I appreciate it. Ed
From a pure programming POV you would rather work with an integer instead of a double. It's much faster and then convert it back when you need to display it etc...
OP, i started my first automated trading system in excel on a retail platform. Does your broker allow you to pull data into excel? order entry via excel? Just build out your signal in excel and use conditional formatting to enter orders. If you can get that far you'll start learning about macros and VB, from there it's a pretty big step to something like C++ but you'll better understand what you are getting yourself into. The trade you suggest in your first post can easily be executed with excel.
I would agree with Winston TJ. Excel is a much maligned and under rated application. All my automated algorithms are implemented using Excel and it works very well. My algorithms dont work in the financial sector but on another exchange and the principles are the same.