programming language

Discussion in 'Professional Trading' started by rosebudxiaojie, May 3, 2007.

  1. I am a student who aims to pursue my career as a trader.
    I will appreciate it very much if I can get some advice on how to prepare myself for my future career.

    what kind of computer skills are needed to be a good trader? Are programming languages important?

    What knowledge should I pay particular attention to at school?
     
  2. contango

    contango

    The only programming skills you need are some basic excel skills to calculate spreads as well as a random number generator to help you decide on which positions to take. You then need a simple IF/THEN/ELSE statement along the lines of: IF losing money, get out quick ELSE if making money, plough in more and raise stop. If you really like programming and/or statistics then you should rather consider becoming a quant or analyst and not a trader.
     
  3. TAKE PSYCHOLOGY COURSES !
     
  4. curtains

    curtains

    Excel - modelling and VBA skills are important if you want to be a trader for an IB - learn how to use excel to create theorectical prices and have them update from live market data. Learn how to input trades generated from excel into your trading program (this is good if you are a private trader also). Position management and statisitcal analysis using excel, especially greek risk if trading options. A good project would be to set up excel to capture a trade you have done, apply a stop loss to it, update live, then have excel send trade to platform if stop is hit.

    From there, you'd only look at c++ or java if you were heading down the quant path, or excel/vba was too slow (ie, you are trading over 100 times a day).
     
  5. First read about trading, then practice trading simulated accounts, learn more about markets movements, when you grow ideas then head to program them.

    Trading isn't about programming only, otherwise every programmer would be rich today. If you have no trading Ideas even being best programmer, still you get nowhere
     
  6. Great advice. I might add: learn about strategies....break-out, trend-following, candlestick pattern, mean-reversion, etc, etc. Most important: money management/bet-sizing.
     
  7. Thanks so much. Your advices are very instructive and insightful.