I've been automated trading with StrategyDesk for almost three years. It's probably the easiest automated trading platform for someone to get started trading equities or ETFs. Like every platform, you can't develop a good trading system with StrategyDesk in a few hour, it take months of development before you can start trading. Then expect many more months of refinement with forward trading/testing. Once you perfect your entry and exit formulas (which are just Boolean logic), you can alway port them to other automated trading platforms that handle more flexible code, like C#.