my friend is conisdering starting to be a programmer for hire for the trading world. he has several years as a developer working as a consultant for all types of businesses, and is looking at finance as a new market for him. If you aren't a program trader but have ideas for a system that you could or would consider automating, is this a service that many people would be interested in? Basically he's thinking you give him exactly what you want to do, and he codes it for you for the API to TradeStation,ToS, Oanda, etc. The whole performance is on you, he would just code it, perhaps backtest it as well. (To get this out of the way, he is a pure computer guy and has no interest in financial markets or using your ideas to trade on his own, and would even be willing to sign NDAs as part of the agreement. He's just trying to make some extra cash) Any constructive thoughts appreciated.
Forget Stocks, move over to Forex for automated trading. If you dont now, you will latter. I suggest you check out brokers like www.dukascopy.com and MBTrading.com ( low spreads) and the order execution API and programming languages.
I don't think he cares or has any ideas about the nuances of the various instruments. He's just looking to take what you want to do and code it so you can automate you system. Given that, i think any instrument is viable.
Give me a program in MT4 which at least double my money within 30 trading days when trading GBP/USD pair (FOREX) trading. same profit target but now trading OPTION. since this will generate lots of money , I'm willing to split the profit, lets say it gives 1000 USD profit per month, than half is his. BTW where is your cut cjone
Quite a few "Trading System Programmers for Hire" advertise in the classified ads of magazines aimed at retail traders: Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities and Active Trader and Futures and so forth. Perhaps your pal might wish to join that particular party by taking out his own ad. Who knows, maybe if he calls up some of those competitors on the phone, they might be willing to chat and give him some advice about how to get into the business. Maybe they'll tell him typical hourly rates, standard NDA arrangements, and other useful facts about "the market" for trading system programmers for hire. Back when Tradestation was called "Omega Research" there was a list of programmers who were "Omega Solution Providers". Presumably they applied to Omega, passed some sort of a qualifications check, paid a co-marketing fee, and then got put on the list. Maybe a similar thing exists today, for Wealth-Lab or TradeStation or AmiBroker or Worden Brothers. Might be worth a bit of investigation. Finally, if your buddy has got maximo cojones grande, he could consider calling up Big Famous Traders directly, and offering his services as a programmer. Larry Williams, Tom DeMark, Victor Sperandeo, Robert Miner, Todd Mitchell , Don Fishback, Kelly Angle, Bart DiLiddo, Ken Fisher, Paul Tudor Jones, Martin Zweig, John Bollinger, Martin Pring, Elaine Garzarelli, Robert Prechter might want a programmer or might be persuaded to want a programmer.
MJG: thanks for the response. I'll definitly pass it along to him. As for the others, he doesnt come up with the system, just codes it, so you'd be billed hourly, not as a cut of profs if your system actually works.
No idea..i doubt very high as he's doing this for extra loot. Anyway, i would like to bring back my original question of does this sound like something where there woudl be enough interest that it would be worth pursuing?
1. tell him to take some EA from forex-tsd.com 2. take the best EA share his opinion about it with all of us here. 3. improve it if necessary. the more programmer involved the better EA should be.