Hi all, I have some trade ideas and these trade ideas all need some sort of market scanning, historical data back-testing, plotting, decision making, and execution based on my own models and signals. They need some sort of programming and data analysis. I am looking for the best trading software(commercial or open source) that are fast (with realtime calcualtion/monitoring of a large group of stocks in mind), convenient (facilitate the testing of strategies), and extensible(so I can plug in my own criteria, signal and models). Please give me some pointers on both commercial and open source trading software! Is there a comparative study? More ideally, if I could find a good open source trading platform that is already established, I can contribute my part to make it more functional!
Unfortunately, if you are serious about your idea you have to bite the bullet, learn programming and do it yourself from the ground up using a good API with one of the electronic brokers (IB, for example). You are not going to be able to "fit" you idea into something like Trade Station if your idea is any good. But if it is a mediocre idea then don't even start. There is no easy way to autamated systems world. You need to pay your dues!
I do know programming. But it's always good to have a testbench so that I can at least know if my ideas are good or not at early stage. It's the testbench that I am looking for... If I start from scratch, after 1 year working on programming, only to find out that my ideas don't work, what to do then?
Have you looked at JSystemTrader? http://code.google.com/p/jsystemtrader/ It is Java based and only works with IB and has no stock scanner but it's a place to start.
Thanks guys. I feel one important feature the trading platform should have is: it can point-and-click and zoom in to any part of past historical data. For example, in the IB TWS I am currently using, I can see the price graph yesterday, but I cannot play analytics on yesterday's data.