That's like saying "cooking is worth $2 an hour". It's true that the line cook at Taco Bell and the executive chef of a place with 2 Michelin stars are both "cooking" in some sense, but equating them overlooks vast differences in the quality of the output. Programming is the same - it's not a commodity, it's a skill that takes years to learn. There are widely varying levels of quality among people calling themselves "programmers" and selling that service. You get what you pay for. If you're starting a high end steakhouse, are you going to go order the cheapest beef you can find? -R (a professional programmer)
I have been programming for over 4 years as my day job. I am quite good at software development, but not so good at trading. For those of you who do automated trading, what do you look for? I would like to make a scanner to continuously monitor hundreds of financial instruments in real time and detect the best opportunities. Where do I begin? Start trading learn the basics before thinking of writing code.
Learn to program on some platform. Charge people to program there system. Wait for one that works to come in. Then trade that one.
this is so true I have to disagree - Have you ever heard someone say "I'm bad at arithmetic but my math makes up for it"? There are two kinds of math, go over to quant land and you will probably find that many of those guys/gals are good at programming AND math, but they are totally seperate. Man I wish I paid attention more in school....
It's much much harder to figure out a strategy/system that'll consistently make you money than it is to code one up. Like I had a C++ class a few years ago but it only really taught me the basics so I was effectively a newb and in a few days just searching online and getting info from the Ninjatrader-support site i was able to code up my system. Could still use some work but in terms of the code i have pretty much everything in place i wanted. indicator based exits and entries, time of day to run system, max daily stoploss, and position stoplosses and total gains
After hundreds of hours of meditation and countless hours of previous life-pain, I have come to the following as a suggestion for new people wanting to learn to trade, the fastest way possible: 1-Grab a (There are dozens. Any will do, really) near breakeven, small losing trend-following method, and start executing it real time in a very small real time, real cash account. (If you thought SIM, for even a split second, then stop right here, you aren't ready. Find something else to do with your life, you'll be happier overall on average). 2-When you can execute 1- perfectly above (which comes after many hours, days, and weeks, of practice), you are a small loser long term, including slippage and commissions. Come to terms with your situation, and accept it for what it is. Look only at one chart of one instrument in one timeframe. Look always at the same chart. 3-After many, many, many hours/days/weeks/months of 2- (which 99.5% of people will NOT do.). Then you will start recognizing, intuitively, when a certain "situation" WILL NOT work, then you can ignore that signal. THAT alone may give you an edge over the long term, and make you a small winner long term (in this case you are A WINNER in a game in which MOST lose. BE HAPPY about this. It is a tremendous achievement!). After a while you will see that doing the opposite of your signal WILL give you an even bigger edge, and make you a not-so-small winner in the long term. 4-After an even longer time, then someone, more enlightened than you, will take pity of you, and give you some compassion, he will literally pop out of cyberspace-nowhere to your rescue, help you completely pull your head out of your ass (You will still need to do most of the pulling.), and you'll start looking at reality for what it is (it is pointless to try to help someone that hasn't endured the unusually enormous amount of emotional and financial pain, sustained over many years of frustration). At that moment you will "inmediately" reach complete consistency of thought and action. 5-You will then, of your own choosing, adopt a boiled white rice diet, and post "stupid" posts, like this, on internet forums, with the hopeless intention that most people reading them, will indeed find something better to do with their life than subject themselves and their families to an undue amount of pain, before enlightment and consistency is even close to being achievable.
Please specify what you mean with "not so good at trading"? If it means that you are not so familiar with terms like bid, ask, dom and so on it would be essential to get a firm understanding of these. However I think you are beyond this already and looking for a way to apply existent knowledge. Then an approach might look like this: 1. Deeply think about what data is accessible through the data feeds (this question is NOT answered as simply as it sounds) 2. What interesting numbers, functions, curves could be computed from this? (The main thing is to reduce noise in the data streams, get as much valuable information as possible, look at things from diffent angles) 3. Compare 2. to what commercial (retail) software allows you to do. If any of your ideas from 2. are not covered in 3. you have a strong indication that you are after something promising. (Why should software designers give out really helpful stuff for a few bucks a month?) Rhethorical question: Which one is better in pattern recognition brain or software? You know the answer. If you want to use your skills as profitably as possible write programs to assist your brain. Don't try to replace it.
Sounds brutal. I wonder how many are capable of dealing with such brutality (especially the all boiled white rice diet) :eek: