I use a system that trades at the NYSE's stock market close. As I'm living in Asia, that involves having a quite shitty schedule. So I wonder if there's any way to do it automatically. My system is based on the following information: the two nearest futures's prices of a particular product, the index price and the number of market days until expiration for each of those two futures. Depending on the result of a formula that uses that information, I either go long one ETF, another one or stay in cash. It seems like a relatively simple strategy, the only "external" information would be the market days until expiration, considering the software itself can't get that from Interactive Brokers. So I'd manually add that data, while the software would get from IB those futures and prices index. Then, my formula would say whether I should buy, sell or hold what I had from the previous day, and the bot would use a market order if needed. I'd appreciate if anyone could guide me. I don't have any experience with this kind of bots, I have always traded manually following my systems.
Yes, you can automate this though IB's api (maybe even excel). As long as your formula is concrete and not gut feel it's doable
You don't define what dependable actually means? 100% hands free all the time, of course not, but the vast majority of the time, yes. With automated alerts and alarms etc when things dont run smoothly.
At what point do you "read" the futures prices prior to placing your trades to be executed at the close?
i want to see him overcome the auto logout and let's go from there. also ib has snapshot quotes which is a little different than real time data.
Part of IB's API offerings is an Excel platform that would suit your situation very well -- it requires no coding skills beyond the algebra of a cell formula and the ability to spec a field like a future's expiry. Its soft spot would be the ability to handle lots of contracts -- which (by design) your needs to not encompass.