I am very curious about this subject to, is it easy to automate trades in excel? Advantages, disadvantages? If someone would go into more depth on this topic it would be appreciated.
Not sure what you mean by "automating" but I believe TradeMagic has an Excel interface (http://www.trademagic.net), never used it myself, just passing the info along. If you are talking about a system that automatically places trades without any user intervention then I have to agree with science_trader, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the job. The only way I could imagine using Excel is if you had a basket of orders you wanted to place all at once, perhaps at the open, you preload them into an Excel spreadsheet and then have it submit the orders all at once...not what I consider automated trading (just automated order submission)
I second that...any number of problems can happen...including an error that starts sending order after order after order...and the only way to stop it is to unplug your machine. This happened to me once...and cost me a good chunk of money.
Any good experiences with other automation platforms? I am using tradestation. maybe I am overly paranoid, but is your code accessible by TRAD?