Ok I may sound a little paranoid. But nobody that trades an automated strategy can tell me this thought has never crossed your mind. If you have an account with an all-around services provider such as Tradestation and depend on them for automated trading, is it ever possible that they can read your strategy code (since clearly their software is on your computer) and then duplicate it in a system somewhere else? Of course your account and strategy would have to be a winner to the point of being an attention grabber.
I built my automated system in Excel and trade through IB. All IB sees is my trades and not what creates them.
Indeed, a very good question. I once heard that there exist software that can log all incoming and outgoing data. Perhaps someone else can confirm this and tells us which software could do the job. One thing is sure: even protected easy language code can be decoded very easily. So protecting your code is useless in easy language.
You might be thinking of a packet sniffer, which records all traffic in and out of your computer for analysys. This is somewhat advanced, but can be done. http://www.atelierweb.com/PTA/index.htm http://www.tamos.com/products/commview/ general info http://grc.com/oo/packetsniff.htm more advanced http://www.ethereal.com/