Dear community, at first: MERRY CHRISTMAS I've got some ideas I wanna trade. Thus I need to program them. How does it work? - I wanna let my strategy run on as many markets as possible (not only FX, ...) - I need realtime-data - not only end-of-the-day - is there a datastream for free? - in what language does one program? Heard and read about Ninjatrader but this is only national stuff, isn't it? Meta4 is only FX, right? What languages do the big IBs and HFs use? Due to my studies (maths) I gained some knowledge about Java, MatLab and R ... so this can be a beginning. You may have noticed, I lack tradingsoftware and datastreams Can you help me? Does my question fit that forum actually? Hope so ... Thanks in advance! Beneee P.S.: I am from Germany ... so please be merciful with my language skills :eek:
I do not know of any free real time data and there are probably none because the data is "owned" by exchanges and there is a fee involved and anyone who "shares" data breaks legal agreements. However, you may check Google Tradelink, Yahoo finance, and some ECN's might have data available as well. If you have an account with a broker then you can get data through them if they provide API or other means of electronic access to data but this usually costs money as well. With programming question look for broker who provides API like Interactive Brokers. Higher level proprietary platforms are offered by few you have mentioned. Not much help but I personally use .Net,(vb, c++). Java is also offered and there are many API derived from the original interface to suit R, C# etc. First start with deciding what is your algorithm and then choose your method. It could be as simple as Microsoft Excel.
Okay, sounds good. Good to know about free real time data. Will start to read about the IB-API. Thought also about Excel but had the opinion that it could be easier with more specialised languages. I'll see ... Thank you for your response!