Truely Automated trading platform

Can anybody suggest an automated trading platform for equities.(nasdaq,amex and Nyse stocks) Not tradestation. One that I can put in a buy or sell order, place a stop price and price/profit exit and watch it go.

I know of flextrade and portware but they are pretty pricey for the little guy. I am getting sick of banging on the keyboard. I am sure some developer could do this but I was just curious to know if there is something or someone out there that I am missing.

Thank You

 

I know you said "no tradestation" but have you ever considered using TS with a third party tool to trade through either IB or Advanced Futures?

I also hear that you can integrate Wealth Lab with IB...

 

RealTick has in their OES.

 

I think there are couple of tools written to work with IB listed on their website.

 

There are a bunch out there now. Every Big Prime broker seems to be coming out with their own platform. I looked around a lot and actually tried ITG's Quantex before switching to Goldman's Tradefactory. Flextrader is supposed to be awesome too, but here is what I've found......the hard way!

First of all, you pretty much have to be running institutional size money to use any of these products. They all work through prime broker relationships, so you must have a prime brokerage account. The legal minimum (Federal Law) is 500K for a Prime brokerage account, but most Prime's want 2M to 5M minimum. Also, you will be required to instal dual redundant T-1 connections for most products. If you meet those requirements there are lots of options for you.

Flextrader is 12.5K/month minimum, just for technology fee's and you get a very robust shell or, basically an API. If you want to trade then you have to establish relationships with everyone you do business with. So you you have to open personal accounts directly with ISLD, INCA, etc. Also, you have to be a bad ass unix/java programmer. Basically, this product was designed for stat arbs working at specialist/MM firms where they have a staff to support it and existing relationships with other MM's, ECN's, and exchanges.

Quantex is great. They will program your strategies for you and pay for your T-1's, so the overhead is low, or at least it seems low until you start paying ticket charges on thousands of tickets a month. Their fee's are a bit stiff and if you want to compete with IB type fee's you have to be doing > 10M shares a month. Also, every trade you make with them has to be cleared through your prime broker which typically will charge you $8 a trade for for 5K trades per month (you do the math).

So that leave Tradefactory. I have become a happy customer of the Goldman Family. If you open a Prime at SLK, you get to use their REDI+ product with no ticket charges and very competitive rates. Tradefactory trades are booked on the REDI trade blotter and daily P&L reports automatically for you accounting convenience (also no ticket charges). You can automate trading of any equity and e-mini's as well.

It runs as a thin client on a win2k front end with a java API for automation. The product was designed for professional stat/index arbs. You can submit hunderds of orders per second. If I submit 100 market orders on a basket of NASDAQ stocks I am 100% filled and reported to my screen in about 1 second. Literally, instantaneous! The same order of NYSE stocks is filled probably instantly, but reported to my screen 95% filled in <5 seconds. There are always a couple of stragglers that take 30 seconds to get the fill reported to my screen (specialists...ugh). Still, it is the fastest DOT box I've used. It is designed to be so reliable and solid that you can run it automated. You can pull data from a nice set of proprietary analytics. I've had zero downtime with REDI+ and Tradefactory.

This is not even in the same ballpark as Tradestation or any other retail front end. I started out swing trading on a web browser based product and have gradually moved up over the years to these products. Over time, I have tested and traded pretty much every retail product out there. IMHO there is nothing out there better than the products offered by SLK.

 

Aprreciate the Insight. I have demoed GS's tradefactory and it is pretty slick and solid.


Thanks again

 

Neovest's IOG (intelligent order generation) is a fully automated system for equites. It is very powerful.

The prop firm EGM uses it.

www.neovest.com

www.egmtrading.com

 

Hi Joetrader,

I also use TradeFactory, mostly the spreadtrader product. It sounds like you are sold on the speed and reliability of the combination, correct? Is that the big draw for you?

I am very happy with it as well, although I've found the interface to be less-than-intuitive. But once you get used to it, it is powerful indeed.

I find it to be very fast also, as I understand it's running on a separate infrastructure, but I am concerned that as it becomes better known and more used, the burden may become greater and slow it down. The TradeFactory group has indicated that they have lots of capability, so that shouldn't be a problem in the future. I guess time will tell, but in the meantime, I completely agree with you.

 

It is not intuitive, but when it comes to automated systems, nothing is! Most similar systems are running on a Unix front end and are very complicated. They are doing the number crunching on your sun box, so if you are VWAPing a 100 name list, all the time slicing, order entry, cancel replace, etc is coming from your box. So, literally, tens of thousands of small trades are being generated from your unix box and routed to appropriate exchanges.
This probably gives some stat arb programs a flexibility edge, but Tradefactory is still highly programmable and runs on a windows thin client. Even the display is a thin client (if you scroll down a list, the list is not there and populates as you go). Tradefactory's back end is a bunch of racks of sun hardware also. I don't know how scalable it is, so someday it may have issues, then again trading volumes have been on a downward trend for the past couple of years (this quarter withstanding) so I don't think there will trouble on the horizon anytime soon. The same list of VWAP names on tradefactory will simply be sent off to TLW's backend servers and the order will be worked from there and reported back to you screen. Nice and light on your windows PC!

In short, I use it because it's API allows you to totally automate your trading and it is fast as lightning. Oh yeah, and if you are clearing Spear, it is priced right too!

 

Word on Neovest. I will take a look at Quantex. Used to be have our JBO with GS and never fully explored the tradefactory.