I've almost finished a trading simulation product, now there are three ways to go: 1. Focus on manual trading simulation and training. 2. Focus on automated trading, developing yet another strategy builder and backtester. 3. Try to fit both of these feature sets into a single product. I pesonally feel that it may be a good idea to focus on one thing. Trying to go both ways will make the product much more complex and harder to use. Which one would you personally choose? Would you ever use a product for manual trading simulation and training? If you will actually use it, for what purpose? What do you expect from it? If you go for automated trading, what may be a source of inspiration and ideas? If you need an automated trading simulator, for what purpose? What do you expect from it? PS: I checked other forums to find that if I place it into "Automated Trading" or "Strategy Development", I will get a biased view.
I do think sim trading is helpful, and have done some for practice. I would focus on one thing at first, then look into adding the other once part A is up and running. Id imagine manual is much easier to code, so Id start there. Good luck!
Thank you! You may be surprised, but manual one is much harder to code and polish UI is always harder and time-consuming than any business logic. UI is about plenty of details, experiments with colors, graphics, layouts, speed and usability optimization. It can't be "written once", it's a never-ending process. There is no "one size fits all", you will always get people who are happy and those who are disappointed at the same time. For me personally automated route will be the easiest one, but I feel that it's a road to nowhere. After learning a lot about backtesting thanks to this forum, I started to believe that it may be a good idea to develop internal automated algo for my personal use, not trying to do it for other people. There is no Holy Grail, especially for the crowd.
Don't code GUI if you can avoid it, the hours quickly pile up even when you're doing something minimal for your own usage.
I absolutely agree with you! Few years ago I spent about 12 months total polishing internal note-taking application just because I wasn't happy with the UI. The best UI is no UI
My first question is why are you writing a manual sim? What features would it have that a combinations of the current brokers' paper/demo accounts and backtesting don't have?
I started to develop it as a way to speed up my personal learning. The idea was to get more screen time in a shorter time span. Unlike in paper/demo trading, I can speed up the simulation up to 600x which means getting 10 minutes of screen time per second, or a whole day of screen time in just 2 minutes. I can also rewind the simulation if I entered at the wrong price. This way I can test and polish any ideas much faster than if I try it live. It already helped me to save a lot of time and some money, by the way: I started to trade live account with an idea which sounded solid at the very first glance (averaging profits, adding levels as price moves to the right direction), but after testing it with my tool I found that my initial esitimation of risks was wrong. I need to have 10 times more money at my account to adhere to risk management rules. I also implemented a feature called "Lessons&Exercises" as an experimental draft. The idea is to find points in the history where some trading setups or events happened, to be able to focus on polishing pattern recognition and finding appropriate stop loss/take profit levels. First 2 exercises make it possible to find and trade sharpest reversals that happened in the history, gradually moving to lower reversals as you practice. There are also plenty of ideas which I plan to implement in the nearest future (trading news and sentiment, getting statistical analysis and details right on the chart, etc.) It all basically comes to the question: does anybody actually need anything of the above?
I recommend you reach out to the Earn2Trade guys on this forum. Presumably they have some tools which they use to help teach people to trade. They might be in a good position to offer feedback on your product.
Those features do seem very useful for testing strategies. Is this for futures, equities or options? Do your sim use real historical data?
Hey! Most trading platforms have a replay feature like you mentioned. Personally, I would not suggest devoting the time to build a trading simulator. There are so many platforms out there that offer paper trading and replay with custom speeds. If people were to learn to paper trade on your system they would then want to use it to live trade, which is a whole other set of needs and issues. If you have specific features you think are missing in the different platforms paper/sim trading, most of them have a vendor program where you could create an add-on service that could be plugged into other platforms. Just a thought!