are there any real free automated trading platforms out there? I am backtesting with Ninja but $50 is too steep per month for my planned futures trading. I would like to pay $10.
there are many open source auto trading softwares.marketcetra,tradelink etc search this forum you will find few more.
hi AB is good.Thogh IB controller developed by AB for transmitting buy sell orders in auto mode to TWS is still in beta mode, one user has posted on other forum that he is using AB for auto trading for last 2 years by using IB controller . metatrader is used for stocks/index too.
MetaTrader is good and fairly reliable as an automated trading platform. It also provides free access to historic data and the backtesting tools are adequate for most types of strategies. I've found it to be considerably better than tools like OpenQuant which costs far more. The downside is that typically you can only use it for Forex (and some CFD's) and typically only with low-end brokers that tend to have quite high transaction costs. It's a cheap way to get started but it's no good for high frequency or large volume.
One vendor is providing live data for NSE(India) stocks on MT4 tone Bulgarian broker is also going to provide live stocks data on MT4 soon.
TD Ameritrade and ThinkorSwim have autotrading capability for their account holders. I can not verify their usefulness or if they offer futures.