Not a programmer here, just looking to do an overnight trade and then forget about it, say buy SPY or SLY MOC and then sell MOO then repeat. Fidelity, TDA, TOS and IB either don't allow this or put up some roadblocks.
How hard is it to enter two orders each day? We have a list trader where you can pre-load the orders and just send them once a day. Very fast.
1) Automation is programming, you say you want to do automation without programming I doubt you are going to have much luck with that, especially if you want to use relatively esoteric order types like MOO. 2) Any broker should "allow" you to automate the trade, but you need programming. I know for a fact you can do it with IB Pro. 3) MOC/MOO on SPY isn't worth it at this point. The anomaly is too widely known. You might as well buy and hold SPY, it's pretty much guaranteed to outperform over the long term considering taxes, commission, and decay of the strategy.
Just want to let it run for a year or two ... seems easier to automate than to punch in daily, risk missing a day, etc.
Hmm, IB gave me some half-cocked reasoning. Maybe I will try again with more specificity. Any very first baby steps you'd recommend for programming? I'm 65, so I don't know how much commitment I would give to taking up programming at this point in life. I'm also assuming that sometime soon, the next step for brokers will be simple ITTT kind of algos for retail. BTW, not doing SPY or SLY that was just an example for my inquiry here.
Best to just get a programmer to code it for you. The environment setup will take much longer than the actual code to place trades in your methodology. I assume you want something like IBC to keep the Gateway/TWS connection alive throughout the week (or month or two), you'd also want to verify your trades are actually received at IB and executed after the open/close, missed trades can get very expensive. All of it requires a decent part of code. If you're relying on your home computer for this and are not around, you'd also need to configure the (Windows) machine so it won't restart in the middle of placing a trade or that IB data won't freeze.
What roadblocks? TOS is also TDA - different interface same broker (schwab eventually once the merger completes) I execute both of these orders types on tos/tda and ib daily.