Why anyone would want to waste money by handing it over to someone else, is beyond me, better to use it to learn how to trade correctly! Unless you are working for some of the big players, I would forget about programming for trading, as all the tools you need to make money are provided by any decent broker like IB or MBT. Excel can be used to automate simple tasks like working out average ranges, trade size, stop loss and profit target. It is of course slow handling live data, compared to other programs using API's with different languages, but again, horses for courses. Why do loads of trades per day when 1 or 2 will do - remove the risk from trading by becoming selective and learning the true value of patience! J_S