Hi craig, You sum it up nicely. Not wanting to exclude the (theoretical?) possibility of people making decent money of their TS or alike tools, I often wonder about it. I kind of went through your experience and would compare developing trading strategies without programming litteracy as crawling in a 3 dimensional world on a flat 2D plane. Of course 'picking up programming' is going to remain a pipe-dream for most who will try to get there quickly. It's like learning to play the violin or piano. Many try. Few bring it to a minimum level of virtuosity. Few can even imagine the work required to become a TRUE virtuoso. Be good, nono
???? loops?? arrays?? booleans? VARIABLES??that is part of coding in any language. The "TS specific" stuff is very simple to figure out by looking at a EL manual and seeing what it means. Porting EL stuff is pretty much trivial. The time is spent on building the framework itself in which you plan on running those strategies Even that isn't difficult, just a lot more time consuming. In response to the person who suggested it would take years to code up indicatiors: not close. You can do several in a single sitting if you have the formula's. re: if one can build it, how come they don't sell it? For starters, an automated system doesn't really need any of the bells and whistles of a "normal" trading platform. No charting, fancy gui's, etc. All it needs is a way to turn it on and off. Where as I'm happy to copy and paste back testing stats into a seperate MonteCarlo app I wrote, and dump the results into a csv file to view in excel, one could hardly market such a thing. The point here is that what's required to make your own blackbox, even one that can run multiple strategies at once using a common framework, is not remotely the same as what one needs to compete against TS, etc. They are not the same sort of programs/products. Most guys here with custom coded "boxes/bots/etc" could probably crank them out easily for others if they really wanted. I know a basic crossover type strategy would take me less then 10 minutes to build and have ready to run live against IB (unless it uses an indicator I haven't coded yet). The coding itself of this stuff is not difficult for a programmer - it's pretty easy compared to what we do during the day. The tough part about building a "white box" (a black box really means you don't know the logic behind it) is finding the edge you plan on automating
I am looking to getting in to API's.Are there any other online communities black box trading ideas are bounced around?
Jason, I don't like the 'black box' terminology. It's like 'quant' and other vapor words. In one way you are right about the above, but that's not how things work. (1) Indicator building: if all you have to do is code up a formula, that's easy. A huge amount of time goes in the design of a framework to use these things intelligently. (2)The same with whipping up some 'black box'-code (sorry) and hook it up to IB or so. Few if any know exactly what they need to put into that boxie for it to start pumping money. Typically people don't, and only dream about it, especially those used to losing money. (3) The purpose of the exercise is to provide you with tools to cook up profitable 'tricks' - call them algorithms to put in your 'black boxie'. This is, at least in my case, why I had to build an analysis environment better than TS, WL, etc. If you manage to get any success in this area, sticking on a bit of code to start trading via IB is indeed very simple. (4) I don't believe that making things look so easy is very realistic. Don't forget that in this game, you kind of play against rather very smart competitors. You got to be at least as smart as them to simply break even. nono
nono: I agree with everything you say here. Maybe this was lost in my ramblings, but my point was that coding the software is not the issue nor the holy grail to profitable trading - figuring out WHAT to code, ie your edge, is the biggest issue. next up is coding the execution platform, etc.. last and least significant is coding the indicators and rules to your system(s). It requires no special talent what-so-ever for a real programmer to actually code this stuff vs anything else they code for 2000+ hrs a year - the special talent is knowing WHAT to code A rogrammer w/o a winnig edge is just a programmer, a trader with a winning edge and no programming skills is still a successfull trader From some of the questions I see being asked, I wanted people to realize that there's no magic to the coding or automating ideas. The REAL hurdle is coming up with a profitable strategy(s). I wasn't attempting to minimalize the effort of developing a profitable automated solution as a whole, but rather trying to impress on people that coding the indicators, etc, is really a non-issue in big picture. One should not think "if I could only get my own 'black box' coded up, I'd make some real money!".. Otherwise, every programmer would be rich BTW: I find this term irritating as well. To other people out there who don't understand why it bugs some folks, "black box" is really just an IT term describing any system in which you can't see into - ie, you don't know the inner workings/rules/etc. A lot of what people here refer to "black box" systems, are really not. One can not code thier own black box But, if after coding it they were to lease it to someone else w/o divulging how it works, then to the lesee it would be a black box.