Hi, I have developed a system that uses constant tick bars & traditional indicators & I have spent a great deal of time testing manually & seems to be working pretty good on most futures & Indices using a regular charting software. But that software is not sophisticated enough to make it completely mechanical so I can not test it with large amount of historical data. I want to get it programmed so that it will be like an algo trading where the algo will do everything including finding the signals & execution of orders with entry, stops & exits. Can you guys please suggest me which charting software will do this and find a programmer to do that ? Also I am going to have to disclose the system to the programmer so how do I protect myself ? Thank You Neal
If you get a programmer that knows one of the common automation platforms already - like NinjaTrader, then he will have an interest in trading. As such, were your system to work, he'd most certainly at least keep it to trade himself and very likely sell it on to others. I have seen this happen many times - people have ideas, find a developer on a trading forum and then 6 months later, they haven't heard from the developer for ages and they see he's got a website selling their ideas. The best way to protect yourself is to find a developer with no interest in trading and to suck up the fact it'll take a little extra time to complete. I'd also get him to just draw dot's on the screen, don't even tell him it'a an auto trader. You can convert the dot drawing to order commands yourself later. Contracts are tough to enforce with this sort of thing because he can claim his idea is different from the one you presented and to prove otherwise would be costly and quite difficult.
For that reason, and the fact that most of the available outsourcees are in other countries, too. One way to try to avoid that is to use someone local, and have them sign a formal non-disclosure and non-competition agreement, but it's going to be really expensive to set up (and still in practice very difficult and horribly expensive to try to enforce later, if needed, for the reason DT mentions above, among several others).
Easy to confuse your own pet system which works and getting it on automatic and to only find it doesn't work profitably. You probably won't know if the system failed or the programmer did. Buy a book or go on a course to program it yourself.
You can go somewhere like Quantifiable and program it yourself for free and use their back testing data for free. You'll need to learn rudimentary Python, but I you have any technical bent (which you probably do given your trading interest) you can pick up what you need to know from 10 hours working through a beginner's Python book you can pick up free at the library.
You can send me a message and ill try to see what i can do. Btw i use sierra chart which may not be very popular but is very powerful.
You say you need to go mechanical, but also say you need to get the system backtested. These are two different concepts. The easiest path would probably be to backtest your system first. This can be done with almost any programmable charting software. I'd suggest you try that first and see how the system fares over time during many different market conditions and reactions. Automating the trades is very easy compared to making a mechanical system that is consistently profitable. The problem with automation is that the system will take all valid signals, at exactly the levels given by the system, so may have worse expectancy than expected. Especially if you haven't really done such detailed analysis yourself, you'll be surprised how much will go against expectations. Why shouldn't the programmer share the system? If you limit your programming, you'll be limiting your potential. There need to be trust and tight collaboration If you don't know/want to learn programming, I don't see how you can have a maintainable system otherwise.
If you know how to code yourself and just don't have the time, this would work. If you don't know how to code, integration would be difficult and it wouldn't be maintainable. If I was putting my money on the line with an automated system I'd either want to know that I understood how it worked or a competent programmer knew how it worked.