Basic Automation Programming

Discussion in 'Automated Trading' started by matgallis, Jun 29, 2009.

  1. Hey Guys,

    Im in the very begining stages of automating options trading. When i mean automate, I mean I will write some sort of program that will calculate various strategies for me and let me know the max profit/loss at what area and at what severity etc and I will choose to implement the trade manually. I'm simply tired of manually calculating losses and also want to dip into a new hobby.

    So what is a simple language i can explore to do this? I took a java programming class about 5 years ago and found it pretty simple to use. My biggest concern is that I will not be able to retrieve option quotes, bids etc from the web and have the program work it's calculations without me inputting many variables. I would like it real time...

    Is java a good program for this? What limits will i run into? Is there a more suitable language to learn that will allow me to reach my goals?
     
  2. I use Visual Basic behind Excel for my auto trades, stock only, no options but it should be the same. the Broker is InteractiveBrokers and the real time data is limited to 100 tickers per account (and another 100 with the paper trading account).
    Java is better but IMO much harder to implement than a combo VB/Excel. Depends what you want to achieve. If you want to arb sub seconds forget it. If you want to trade in seconds and over it's fine unless you do some crazy covariance matrix that could take longer.
    Why not go with a software package that already exist? I guess some are affordable.
     
  3. Thanks for the input, VB was my other thought also. I want to learn rather than just reuse someone else's work :)
     
  4. I use Java with IB TWS API. You can do all the things you mentioned.