I've spent some time trading and I also do software development. I would like to get into automated trading and quickly start testing strategies. I currently have an account with Interactive Brokers but unlike Tradestation they don't provide backtesting software.. just their API. I could spend some time writing my own backtesting and automated trading software but I would rather spend my time focusing on my trading strategy and less on building trading software to use IB's API. What would be the fastest route for me to get going? Is there something like Tradestation for Interactive Brokers?
google tradelink project tradelink is : * free and open source * trade strategies or full applications * live with IB and 15 other brokers * has super-fast tick-based backtesting * can record ticks from any live source * can import ticks from many sources * 200+ member user community google tradelink project
Another alternative is NinjaTrader, which allows you to do strategy development/backtesting in C#. The help file is fairly well documented and their forum is also useful. If you are using something other than time-based charts (tick or volume), the TWS data feed will be less than useful...in which case I'd probably try a demo from Mirrus or Amp Futures which will allow you to try out the Zenfire or CGQ data feeds for free as well. This way you can pull down a bunch of data to play around with and not have to pay for a data feed until you need to go live. The Mirrus demo limits you to one demo account every 90 days and the Amp demo expires after 5 days (but you can renew it). You only need to pay for Ninja once you want to execute live trades.
Amibroker might be a good fit - www.amibroker.com Very good (and fast) backtesting, inexpensive, great support, has an interface to IB for both quotes as well as trading. I've been using it for years. D.