I'm a Canadian discretionary trader. Trade through IB. I've been wondering for years what the best, simplest way of automating a system for Canadians would be. Trade US futures and equities. To the best of my knowledge we can't use TradeStation and we can't trade using Wealth-Lab/Fidelity. I realize that I could program something in Excel and feed that through IB. I've also looked at Ninja Trader a bit but it's not the easiest thing for a non programmer to use. I have no programming experience. Suggestions as to what I could use to backtest and automate my trading? Cheers
http://tradelink.googlecode.com free and open source. works with IB as well as sterling (both of which support canadian traders), and 8 other brokers.
Hi Junkyard, I have had the same question too for the longest time. I have also tried to do my own thing using Excel with IB and I've had nothing but problems along the way. If you have found a solution, please let me know. I am currently looking at tradelink as an alternative.
"Best" and "simplest" are rarely pointing at the same thing. If you're already using IB, what is missing for you?
I finally got around to watching the tradelink youtube videos. It looks pretty good actually. I wish there were more reviews and people using it.
Hi Junkyard, I am a Canadian, living in Canada, with a Tradestation account. There is some extra paperwork to fill out when applying, but unless things have changed in the past 5 years, you should be able to get one too. Multicharts (a tradestation clone) has an interface to IB. I also have an IB account, tried out Multicharts, and have configured this interface for automated trading about 2 years ago. I found that the interface was "flaky", and unsuitable for unattended automated trading. Multicharts is always improving, so it may be better now. The benefit of Multicharts over Tradestation is that all the strategies are compiled, so backtesting is much faster. Suggestion: use both IB and Tradestation. IB for longer term manual trades, and Tradestation for testing strategies and intra-day automated trading (once you find a profitable automated intra-day strategy!). Tradestation costs more per month, they make their money from selling the data feeds. Good Luck! Gavin