What are the most professional automated trading platforms ?

januson · Sep 12, 2012

I have never seen a professional trading platform and doubt it that such exists for the public.

All those mentioned in this thread are just for playing where 99% will blow up your account, the rest 1% will probably work somewhat profitable most of the time in a semi-automatic manner.

Swan Noir · Sep 12, 2012

If you are essentially a retail trader -- as I am -- you will probably end up trading with retail tools. At the point you have system that requires better tools you must either invest in them or stick to something simpler. For my purposes Sierra Charts works fine but I am the furthest thing fom automated.

No one asks what glove to buy to make the major leagues. I'm not suggesting it is a real comparison but make yourself a solid AA ballplayer before you take on Goldman, Miller Tabak et al.

neutrosphere · Dec 5, 2012

i had a quick question regarding automating options. it seems everyone is using IB for automating an options strategy. I have a working C# options strategy which I plug at a different brokerage but the fees are just too high. I am looking for a new firm other than IB. Any suggestions? Any options brokerage that has an API interface (automated).

aaxaa · Jan 23, 2013

Few years ago Optionshouse was the only broker that had commissions cheap enough to keep my strategy profitable.

Used to volume 1000+ contracts and pay 10 cents and no flat fee.
They only had web based trading back then. I think the commission is still not bad.

They have come up with a actual platform, you can check with them if they plan to introduce API.

Quote from neutrosphere:

i had a quick question regarding automating options. it seems everyone is using IB for automating an options strategy. I have a working C# options strategy which I plug at a different brokerage but the fees are just too high. I am looking for a new firm other than IB. Any suggestions? Any options brokerage that has an API interface (automated).
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Alex27 · Mar 20, 2016

Epic said:
Well i don't really see how using a product suite like deltix is much different than what i said. They have pretty much just gone and pre-packaged and assembled all of the components that i mentioned. Then they charge pretty insane prices for it.

You might be more familiar than i am with Deltix, so correct me if i make any errors. As i understand it, you still subscribe to market data from your typical source like bloomberg. Deltix has then assembled its own database for aggregation and retrieval. I don't see how it could be any better than SQL server. Then they have provided full MatLab integration with a fairly extensive analisis toolkit. But a MatLab web search turns up a hugely extensive analysis library. Then they have a trading automation platform with C# integration for building your own indicators and trade parameters. Platforms like X-trader and CQG and others already provide this including colocation for execution.

If you read the FAQs you'll notice that they explicitly state that the user will still need to be proficient in C# or C++ to utilize the product suite and fully implement a trading system.

I've not gotten a quote yet, but I've heard numbers around $100k annual. The package I suggested might cost about $20k on the high end. What are they providing for the extra $80k? The point is that you still can't just use their drop-down list of chart studies and end up with a good system. You have to do all the custom analysis and API development. They've just assembled a "product suite" out of essentially the same list that I provided.
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Why is Deltix good becasue it has api links to all the big exchanges and banks like goldman so you can scale easily - thats one of things you pay the 6k a month lol

Alex27 · Mar 20, 2016

SamGold said:
If you have a profitable strategy that works in any platform or language, there are a few proprietary lines of code, maybe one page, maybe 100 pages.

All the rest can be outsourced safely, fast connection, order management, etc, etc. fast execution, etc, etc, etc. Others have done it already for you and it's basically open source for all platforms, brokers, etc. Use anything you want, hire a programmer to put it all together, but keep your 1 page secret. When it comes time to add your secret page to the code, ask the programmer to teach you to code your page yourself and how to so that you can do a basic copy and paste without the programmer being present. Then pay and fire the programmer.

C++, C#, assembler, VBA, all good...

Now if you want to learn some fancy new language like R or python in the hopes that you'll find a datamining edge jerking off with the data, you are wasting your time.

Develop in excel/VBA and then when you have something worthy of execution, translate to C# or assembler or whatever.

Everything else that you read is bullshit by wannabe-quant-trader employees. Use what you already know or if you know nothing about programming use EXCEL-VBA to research, or easylanguage, or MC or whatever.

99% of your final code has been already developed for you or can be at minimal cost... Now the 1 % secret page...don't show it to anyone. All the value is there.
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Hi Sam, What do you think are the best platform to use out there to keep the logic secret?

I have been looking at Matlab, Sierra Charts and Amibroker as well, what do you think?

The things I have been looking for in a auto trading platform:

SECURITY - Max on execution platform, Backtesting on local machine, VPS server is protected.

BACKTESTING - Fast so we can quickly fine tune, secure so results are not in the cloud.

EXECUTION AND SPEED - Needs to link to decent data like IQ data api and interactive brokers easily and be able to run in the micro seconds and nano seconds for tick level execution.

syswizard · Mar 20, 2016

What about Multicharts ?

Alex27 · Mar 20, 2016

ITS BUGGY HAD IT CRASHED A FEW TIMES MC.NET

syswizard · Mar 21, 2016

Not surprising...it's much newer than the classic version of MC.