Best software to program system

I am at a point in my trading futures that I want to start to automate my system. My main account is with IB and reviewed their webinar using excel. In your opinion where should I invest my time learning to program my system?

 

C# + http://www.dinosaurtech.com/utilities/

It takes several hours if you know both.

 

I agree, I would go straight to C#. I am currently coding in C# after spending the first four years of my career in Excel/VBA.

Excel is a good research and development platform, ie you can make changes easily on the fly and you can 'see' all of the data, but you'll find that it is lacking severely when it comes to automation.

 

Thank you for the suggestions and where to focus my efforts.

 

Why do you want to automate? Don\t you enjoy trading yourself?

 

"Why do you want to automate? Don\t you enjoy trading yourself?"

I mainly trade the index futures. I think that once your system is well established and it can be automated then do it. Automating reduces some of my persistent bad trading traits emotions, hesitation and waiting to long to take a stop, etc.

 

Have you looked at NinjaTrader? Doesn't it have the ability to automate a significant amt of your trading and it already integrates with the IB TWS. Plus the learning curve is considerably shorter than learning and designing your own system.

Or at least start with that before you move to something more proprietary

 

Thanks for the recommendation and I will check it out. It doesn't look to expensive either.

 

neoticker and sierra are both quite good.

 

I'm doing full automation of some of my ib trading using Sierra Chart as the platform at present.

SC does the ib interface and I just generate the system (c++ compiler but only a subset of the language needed) behind it. You could also build a system on their worksheets but I prefer the near infinite power of the c++ interface.