Wondering what one can expect to pay a programmer to attempt to automate a strategy. Any rough estimate? How does one go about finding a good programmer? Has anyone does this, and if so how did it go?
I was interested in doing this because I thought i'd be a good way to learn something from someone else that has an edge. I've done ~ 10 of these, programming people's strategies in various platforms / APIs and after about doing 5 or so I realized that it was completely worthless ... so I said I'll program you strategy for FREE, if it is something of value. And after about 5 of these I realized that I still was getting nothing. So now I'll only program strategies if someone can show that they are very mildly profitable, many not from that strategy, but something to see that I might be able to learn something. Sorry for coming across so cold, it's just that I'm not in the business to program, however I'm very open to discuss strategies that beat the market (from people who are actually beating the market) anyway the answer to your ? is I charged 30 to 60 / hr.
I am curious - what do you want it to be programmed in? And Sky123987 - what did you program the strategies in? Are you building a standalone program from scratch or is it 50 lines of TradeStation EasyLanguage?
Depends on the language you want it coded in. Something in general use like VB is less expensive. A good place to look for programmers is dice.com If your trading platform has the ability to execute encapsulated code and the system you want to implement can be defined by modeling then there is a much faster and cheaper alternative. Many of the general purpose data mining applications have the ability to take historical examples along with your desired goal and turn them into a predictive model. The results can be exported to VB, C++, Java, XML, etc to be used by another application (your trading platform). Since the software does the heavy lifting, the human effort is limited to defining the inputs and the goal you want to predict, so the human hours are a fraction of the cost of having a programmer code a complex rule based system. This is the approach I went to after spending dozens or hundreds of hours programming ideas only to find they didn't work as well as I thought or they stopped working after the market evolved its patterns over time. With a model you can remodel the market as it evolves or even weekly as opposed to having a static programmed system. The actual run time to generate a model for most commercial grade predictive applications is less than 24 hours. This may compare with weeks and weeks of programming and testing time for a complex trading system.
Hi, I have about 10 years of C++ programming experience. I developed several ATS for my clients. I have an experience with following technologies: -InteractiveBrokers TWS -StrategyRunner -FIX protocol for VelocityFutures -NinjaTrader -OpenQuant -Collective2 API Also I am ready to learn new things. My rate is $25/hour. For detailes please PM me or contact via email yefremov(at)excis.com replace (at) with @ Best regards, Yaroslav
Some programmers charge $30 per hour, others $100, and still others charge $500 per hour. In this example shown below, the programmer is also a well known "name". A trading author, lecturer, and website owner.
You're welcome if you'd like to programm your trading system or other projects. I have wide practical experience C++/C#/VB/Java programming and in particular ATS development using IB, oanda, esignal, iqfeed API. My rate is negotiable and depends on complexity, terms, project duration ($27-65/hour, possible percent from ATS income). Please feel free to contact me if you need through PM or e-mail (read vice versa): moc.liamg@repolevedsta
You mentioned the concept of a protion of payment for services as a percent of the profitability of the system programmed. What is your lower limit on a system in terms fo annual return on total account? For example if a tradig account for a given system had $10,000on Jan1 adn grew to $20,000 on Dec. 31, it would have a 100% return on account. Jerry
How to rate a programmer by price. Free = I want to steal your idea < $25 = I don't speak english to well and good luck finding me after I have your cash < $50 = I will give you an estimate but after I miss it, you wish you paid for a better programmer < $100 = I double all my hours so I make more from you If you are programming a system that trades with real-money expect to pay real-money for it work properly. One bug in the application can cost you many times the price of a good programmer.