FYI, SmartQuant recently launched OpenQuant for the retail user. It's a simplified version of QuantStudio which is an automated trading and development platform. The price is $499 for a perpetual license or $29.99/mth. Also, there's a 30 day evaluation version. The programming language is C#. I've just read through one of the manuals but haven't started looking at the product just yet. I'm cautiously optimistic that this may be a relatively inexpensive way to begin to bridge the product gap from shitty retail offerings like TradeStation (which I use) to institutional platforms. http://www.smartquant.com/openquant.php -BlueLou
Sam, I read your posts on the SmartQuant forum. Are you already using QD or just evaluating OpenQuant? What do you think so far? I'm okay with using EasyLanguage for what I'd call novice-to-intermediate-level programming. Do you think I'll be okay with C# as used in OpenQuant? I'd just be using it to write fairly simple functions, to call custom DLLs, and to improve an existing strategy. My true interest in OpenQuant is the chance to start to use a real programming language, to develop projects in a real IDE, and to run them in a stable operating environment. Maybe I won't even need C++ DLLs anymore. Do you think I'll get this with OQ? Perhaps as a prelude to QD? -Lou
Lou, I think OpenQuant will admirably meet your needs as expressed above. For $30/month for a development and trading platform of that caliber you can't go wrong. It's the opportunity cost of your development time compared to competing platforms that's really the issue. To be honest, I still don't have a real opinion on that one yet as I don't have a good handle on the feature set that's going to be in the release version. Hope that helps. Sam
We are pretty close to OpenQuant public release. Visual Basic.NET support, optimization and other features were added in the latest update. The documentation (Getting Started Guide and Startegy Development Guide) is in place too. OpenQuant beta comes with about twenty pre-programmed and ready to run automated startegies from "Trade Like a Hedge Fund" and "Beyond Technical Analysis" books. Everyone is welcome to take part in the final beta testing - we need your feedback! Cheers, Anton
Syswizard, There are a few. The most frequent hassles are the TS connection going down around 12:37am every night and limitations in EasyLanguage which lead to most of my work being done in C++. I'd rather have one good real-time data vendor, one good IDE, and one good brokerage than a vendor that does a mediocre job at all three. -Lou
Various chart scripting languages can call dll's. I could turn all my indicators into dll calls and speed things up possibly if I could get the dll's to access history bars directly. I wonder if Quant Studio would have any speed advantage in that case?
OpenQuant always runs compiled code, so that your strategy code runs at the same speed as other compiled code. It's also possible to call c++ dlls right from .NET strategy code in OpenQuant, If you frequently call external dlls in your trading script, it may degrade performance (it depends on how your scripting engine talks to external dlls). It may happen that you spend 10% on calculations in external dll and 90% on invoking the dll from your script. But sure, you can call dlls from nearly any scripting language and if you call dlls for time consuming heavy calculations, it can speed things up a lot. Cheers, Anton
Why is it called OpenQuant when it's not open sourced software? It's fine if you are trying to make money by selling closed source software. Just don't try to piggyback off the open source software movement and decieve anyone by using the word open in your product name.