I've been trading for a while and now I wanted to test some ideas, backtest with historical data and maybe develop automated trading. The thing is I'm from finance and not engineering or computer science, I don't know programation but I want to start. What should I learn? I rest on your advice since I can't afford the time to go trough trial&error learning C and finding it useless, then changing to .NET or PEARL and all that to find that what I should have learned 10 years ago was C++. So I would appreaciate any wise input.
there's no one right way to do it. what are you goals? which language or trading platform appeals to you most? go to the book store, browse through a couple of different programming books... if you want a general purpose language, languages with built in memory management like c# and java are increasing in popularity... mainly bc the learning curve is smaller and they're easier to work with. if you're going to be trading stuff that requires sub-second executions, like scalping or systematic trading in some really fast markets... you probably want to stick with c++. if you're not really interested in programming and it's all about the finance... you probably want as much of a sandbox as possible, yeah? why not just go with an all-in one trading solution like meta stock or tradestation? you get a language that's easy to use and focused on whatever type of trading you're focused on, lots of other people doing the same thing to talk with, learn as you go.
If you're interested in trading stocks, I suggest going with a trading system like CoolTrade, which does not require any programming. You can test your strategies without cutting a single line of code. Also, the CoolTrade system is free if you have a TD AMERITRADE account. Good Luck! Ed
If you're worried about execution, because you're running some kind of high frequency low latency trading algorithm, go with C++. For everything else, just pick whatever suits you. I've been doing a lot of stuff in C#/F#.
if you want to backtest ideas, probably most of it can be done in tradestation. That's probably the easiest way However, THE language for trading stocks hands down is C++. Most all brokerage APIs at least that I'm aware of use that language