it is very simple. Use path of least resistance. For example NinjaTrader has tons of lower end things done for you out of the box. All you really need to focus is your model and execution. Unless you are HFT it will suffice for most. Algo trading is hard enough, my advice for you to not reinvent the wheel even if you personally do not like Windows or Linux.
Is Ninja in this instance free or a $1000? I agree that algo trading without indicators is hard as hell. I would likely need a budget and a quant team to pull it off. I am a price action trader who has experimented with indicators and systems since Wealthlab was sold to Fidelity. I simply do not buy the indicator usefulness theorem but programming price action would be a vast undertaking. I am not even sure if looking at price data at various time frames possible with any API? True price action trading trades 5-minutes charts with 60-minutes and daily/weekly highs lows used as support/resistance, using only a Moving Average.
When I bought the book there all kinds of problems with the implementation. The author had us doing a lot of mods to get it to work and I gave up after about a week of trying. Can't say what is going on now. It was not worth that amount of effort then.
Yes, but in my kind of Bot as I envision, I'd need a Java or C#/Python API that supports multiple timeframe of bars, threads, and state processing almost to the 5-15 min. bar. The languages such as Wealthlab etc that are for simple indicator based bots that are of no value IMHO. The way I see it the market has 6 states, sideways trading range, uptrend/downtrend with pullbacks, and breakouts up/down without pullbacks.
not once because of ninja. We have issues with IB when gateway gets daily resets on their end around mindnight. I test throughly my code, thus no issues. Had my own initial bugs years ago, but ironed them out.
PEBCAK. I haven't had any "hack attacks" or security issues since Windows XP 10+ years ago. I will admit that Windows is the least secure of any OS though, so you have to know what you're doing. My Windows on a old lower end system boots in some 10-15 seconds... There's quite a few tests online showing how Windows is faster than OSX running on same hardware. Sounds like you had a low end PC which is of course slow, you "upgraded" to a Mac that's 5-10 times more expensive and were surprised. If you had bought a high end PC for the same amount, things would have been different. You can't get a Ferrari paying Nissan money.