I want to Open Source my trading platform

I am entertaining the idea of releasing my trading platform as open source software if I can find enough people interested in building a development community around it.

You can read more about it here (it is an old article though):
http://www.bitcortex.com/2009/03/10/automated-trading-platform-show-tell/

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts and feedback

 

Trust what Linus Torvalds has to say about open sourcing your project:

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That's not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you'll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they'll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you're going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

Torvalds continues, “If you start off with some ‘kumba-ya feeling’ where you think people from all the world are going to come together to make a better world by working together on your project, you probably won't be going very far.”

My personal opinion is that I think you'll get quite a bit of help as the word spreads. Nice screen shots on your web site.

[Github would be a good place to host the software. It's pretty tough to beat git for flexibility when it comes to the source code control.]

 

Perfect reply SteveH!

Here's a link to the original(?) article.

I agree the screenshots are nice.

 

Sounds interesting. A suggestion like this comes up on these forums every few months and 9 times out of 10, it leads nowhere.

In fact I'd say there's more than a fifty percent chance you won't even post again. For some reason a lot of people sign up, make one post and never appear again....

However, just judging from your couple of blog posts you might actually have the time and organizational skills to get the ball rolling properly to give it a chance of success.

Before you proceed though, ask yourself what will make it different from the existing open source efforts out there: TradeLink, ActiveQuant and Marketcetera amongst others?

 

I think there are a few nice ideas in those screenshots - i like the interactive console and the study interface. If you decide to put it online, i would certainly give it a closer look.

 

I guess I found out why 50% of new users will never post again - as soon as I made my first post my account was suspended, probably because my post had a link in it. Quite heavy handed!

When it comes down to it, I see a trading platform is a commodity so I would find it hard to say how my platform is different from the others. The only things that come to mind are that it would serve to the .net crowd (written in C#) and that it was designed to be as much of an exploration tool (like MATLAB) as it is an execution platform.

 

Yeah, that does seem a bit heavy handed but is necessary to keep out the spammers. As long as you keep Google Adwords off your site and offer no commercial services you should be able to link to your site again after a 100 or so more posts....!

Going the .Net route means you are in competition with TradeLink and the popular NinjaTrader (free to play with and develop) amongst others.

Are you really offering anything special or unique outside of these products or is it just a vanity project?

Anyway, first thing is to choose a place to host the code, decide on an open source licence, upload the code and then let people know about it.

I don't like Google Code or SourceForge but that's just me. GitHub is okay. There are others.

Ratio of leechers to contributors is very high. As another poster mentioned earlier, expect to be working mainly by yourself with other people mainly playing the role of unhappy customers: "it would be better if it did x?" "When is feature y going to be ready?"

You will receive little thanks for your efforts. At least initially.

 

Will your platform be a framework or a tool? Most platforms out there are tools with GUI. It would be nice to have a GUI-less framework in .NET that encourages users to write plug-ins (data feeds, broker interfaces, storage, etc.)

Regarding exploration, one can also use F# Interactive like Matlab and R.

Tradelink is pretty good. I am looking into it myself as well.

 

The screenshots look promising.

I guess your design brings together best practice in each field such as a scripting language for prototyping, balance between development time and performance of C#, machine learning of Mathlab, and immediate backtesting.

I will be the first one to join.

 

Looking good, look forward to further updates..