Around 10 years. I have a masters in Computer Science. But it is not that hard to learn. I think anybody can learn it. Cheers,
This question has been mulled over many times. If you want to stay a loser, stick to your WL & TS. That's what all of those use. To win, you need tools that will support developing something much better. Ya need: (1) speed of development; (2) availability of rich libraries/modules; (3) speed of execution. If ya have any sense of future life continuation, include: (4) portability between platforms; (5) independence of proprietary slave masters: go OSS, the right time is now! For me, only Python can give you this, with Ruby as second runner up. Java is a proprietary dog. Speed of execution is often brought up against scripting languages by know-nothings about today's programming realities. A language like Python acts mainly as a scheduler/launcher glue in between highly optimized C language code, especially when you structured your application in making use of the appropriate libraries. nononsense
Can one create an index in Wealth Lab and perform backtests on the index itself? I know in AIQ i can tale a basket of stocks and create an equal dollar index and perform backtests and simulations at the index level. The problem is they have very limited position sizing,money management capablities
I've been working on for the past few months of converting my WL systems (developed over the past 2 yrs) to something "independent" of WL/Feedelity. I still use WL, and WL does have it's advantages in the testing/optimization space. Currently, I have WL running systems under "test" during the day, and once I feel confident enough to turn these systems "live" I prepare to switch them over to a Java-based system I wrote using QuickFIX (open source fix engine) and various market data tools (OpenTick). I have been interested in QuantLab (http://www.smartquant.com/) and the environment it creates, perhaps someone who has used it in LIVE trading can comment on this app. I am currently writing a system for Crude Oil, but until OpenTick can get NYMEX data (perhaps when CL goes live on Globex this summer) it's just in "testing" stage using WL and NYMEX data. I never thought I would say it, but this is the first time I am looking forward to a predominantly pit traded contract to go "electronic" during the trading day. Java has proven to be a rather good language to base my "systems" on. I'm extremely familiar with Java (from my days of programming in it), so I may be a bit biased here. Quantlab and it's .NET platform has promise, and C# is very similar to Java (IMO). Even QuickFIX has .NET libraries. The only reason I would move from WL is because of the "Feedelity lock". Other than that, I have been throughly impressed with the system.
I'm no programmer, but couldn't one code something similar to this to circumvent the 'lock' referred to above? - Spydertrader
IBData doesn't work on WL Pro, only WL Developer... Already tried that. It also makes WL somewhat unstable on exceptions.