Thank you guys, now i see the thread is going to the right direction. I have a question here. What if i want only to develop my automated trading idea on excel and demo this by connecting to some demo trading software. My question now is NOT regarding live trading but just for testing environment. My idea here is not making Excel work as a trading platform but just as automated strategy that execute on another platform and get results from it. Excel gets price quotes from the platform----> process it ----> send sell and buy / open close orders to platform-------> get results and so on What is the trading platform that one can use for this purpose? Thanks
SierraCharts! That's what I use and it is excellent although not 5 star. From scratch without knowing anything about the software I set up a basic auto trading system in 9 months. I bought a new computer, loaded it with SC and IB TWS (didn't know either of these how to use at the time) and coded with a few glitches along the way. My one advantage is I had experience coding with Amibroker and I know Excel reasonably well. Obviously Amibroker is different to Excel, but it is the coding skills which are similar, ie Algo structure mentality.
Imo the "problem" with Excel is that communicating with it is slow. However, in theory there is nothing wrong with the spreadsheet interface as a trading front end. Data would be represented as dynamically coming into a certain range of cells, marketdepth or TOB. Trading systems would be a matrix of cells acting on those data cells (vector). If you had a spreadsheet control that understood most of excel functions __and__ communicated with an external application (or embedded the spreadsheet control in a WinForm etc) at extreme speed, why not? Are there any Excel like controls out there (callable from C++/C#) that run super fast?
These types of discussions always remind me of the old saying something to the effect: "Its not the tools, its the carpenter."
I have autotraded in the recent past with this set-up which used Excel (see "RTD in Autotrader").... worked fine. You get the solidity, quality and speed of TT X_Trader and the ability to express and design your strategy in Excel. It's nice ... https://www.tradingtechnologies.com/products/trading-analytics/xtrader/autotrader/
Yes. Excel. It can be referenced in .net c#, vb, c++/cli (Microsoft version of c++ - managed) application and automated from within that application as one of the components of such application. Just because it would be part of C# application does not mean it would be super fast but .net applications in general are very good in terms of performance due to code optimizations. There are also third party controls that would do it.
I speak about Excel 2000,I don't know recent versions but I don't think the principles have changed. VBA is a visual COM version of Basic inserted in an Excel object model.As such, you can do whatever you want with it,and there various ways of doing the same thing.You can even use system API and do system programming. It can be quite fast,though not as fast as VB6 given that it can't be compiled. You could program a socket interface to TWS without ActiveX or DDE and connect directly to IB TWS. Or you can implement a FIX engine in VBA inside Excel, and it can be quite fast (you have to know some tricks to make it speedy). Question is: is that the best instrument? I saw a lot of people doing a lot of things with Excel which were awful because they tried to get results typical of a database. You can program whatever trading strategy you want with Excel,but maybe it will take longer than using softwares made for that. My suggestion would be to separate the trading engine from Excel and make it export data for Access (or sqlite,firebird,mysql...) and Excel. Microsoft in the late 90ies was making seminars on how to create complex solutions using very few lines of code and integrating Office and Backoffice suites through VBA. In my opinion that's the way to go.
I've done this on TT XTrader, but it's expensive. You might be able to get a demo. But TT is geared more for industry professionals -- meaning, if you're not licensed and active, they might not talk to you. I'll bet some of the front-end packages advertised on this site might be available to retail traders. If you want to take the best approach, learn FIX. It will probably be harder at first, but it is the standard. OTOH, perhaps for simpler things a DDE connection (or some such) to Excel is still available.