@MarketCoding it is not really clear to me what you are trying to achieve with automation. Should buying/selling be automated? Should charts be automated? Or otherwise present information on your computer screen to you so that you can act upon it? Should you receive signals via email?
Well I don't manage anybody else's account so it would just be for my own strategies. This means I don't need some of the portfolio management stuff that professional smite need. I'm a day trader and I get the signal from the underlying and then look up the option code. I'm always out by the end of the day. I do this manually and it is the query of the option code that I am really trying to automate. I have something developed to with Sierra Charts and C++ that I think I'm going to stick with after learning that the platform matters very little at least in the beginning stages of development.
I'm not a programmer. So correct me if I'm wrong. Why can't you have your charting software "talk" to a FIX server you set up. Then the FIX server can use any FIX API to route orders at any broker, or multiple brokers that offer FIX? If your charting software does not give you that flexibility, choose one that does.
Sierra charts might be okay. I'm learning that 75% of the code is packaging and is platform-specific but the rest of it, the meat of it is fully transportable between platforms.
If you are looking for a developer, and are looking to do this in C++, and you want to execute with IB, maybe I can suggest myself and some code I've written: https://github.com/rburkholder/trade-frame As IB only updates data streams 4x per second, I use IQFeed, which provides full data streams on equities, options, and futures for my data feed. I then execute trades against IB. Given the basic engine, pretty much any strategy you care to execute can be programmed. I don't have any pretty screen shots yet, but i hope to do that in a few days.
Last time I used them, a number years ago, when it was known as QuantDeveloper, they were C#. Have they changed?