How does multicharts help you get on a path to auto trading options? That can only give a trading signal, not enable automated trading with options that require more knowledge than stock trading.
Multicharts does give more than a trading signal. It provides full automated trading of the signals against the option code whether it is chosen (hard coded) or calculated.
Are you in it to make money or the programming achievement? Both are cool with me. If you choose the former, it seems like an incredible waste of time. A rabbit hole, if you will. Building a FIX based OMS with Excel will allow you to Automate every conceivable analytical model and be marketable to many users/potential employers. At the very least, you will have the steering wheel for the Formula One car that you are trying to build in your garage.
xandman, Thanks for this comment "building a FIX based OMS with Excel will allow you to Automate every conceivable analytical model and be marketable to many users/potential employers". I hadn't thought about it from that angle. I'm interested in figuring out how that might work. Let's start here and say that I wanted to create a 1 min chart of SPY in Excel? How would I do that?
Note: If you tell your programmer friends you are making a FIX based Excel OMS, they will be revolted by the waste of FIX's speed. But the simple fact is, many financial advisors ad traders with no programming ability have to interface with FIX systems. I tried to find such a solution and they were charging $500 a month. Probably because FIX requires final customizations specific to your broker. It is made by creating an Excel Add-in with C#/.Net rather than using VBA. For Excel: You select a column range(array) to house your historical data request. Simply highlight the cells, click insert, select chart type. Excel can even do candlesticks. Btw, FIX is for orders and messaging. Not for market data. That is another subscription type. Let me state: This is not in support of day trading options. However if we dissuaded every trading idea, we might as well be indexing. Talk to Bob. He will open up a world to you.
Yeah, so from a "day trading perspective", I think Multicharts might work for testing my own ideas. However, your thinking intrigues me with respect to long-term strategies (such as a married put that I have adjusted on apple about 10 times). I can't code this in Thinkorswim quite the way I want to, so it has been somewhat of a manual process in putting in each adjustment. Also, the thought of using Excel in conjunction with a high-level programming language such as C# seems very exciting to me, and then the portability aspect of whatever I develop is definitely worth some thought. Can I get live market data into excel? If so, how? Can you upload an example sheet?
A common example is the web query in Excel. Unfortunately, I can't get it to work because of Javascript conflicts. The 2nd is Excel RTD which only works with your platform subscription when available. There are many examples on the web.
I normally never do this but sometimes it happens and it works. It all depends on the situation but yeah 99% of the Time it makes zero sense to daytrade options. I am 1 trade away from being flagged as a PDT which is very rare but its been an interesting week All from Options trading, Zero equity trading. Number of day trades/round trips for xxxxxx (account xxxxxxx): 3 in the last 5 days or less. Why is this important? Executing one more day trade/roundtrip will cause xxxxxxx (account xxxxxxxxx) to be flagged as a pattern day trader. Why is this important?
Thats all I do. I agree though its a very powerful tool but it requires lots of study/years of experience, attention to details along with a good capital base and risk management policy in place. I would say its like Flying a 747-400 filled with filled passengers.
A 747 is more like Stock investing -- while options trading... is more like a B-2 Stealth bomber Way different beasts, and purposes. and skill/technicality/complexity. and rewards,