I have these simple comparison and welcome to give any comment: Build own trading system advantage: 1. you would know exactly everything and every step, no per-define stuff that always happens in retail trading system, so the chance to have some definition wrong to have wrong outcome would be minimum. 2. There are a lot things especially more complicated stuff that retail trading system just not designed to do that, so self made trading system gives the best flexibility and basically can make anything that in your mind really happens. 3. Even though build own trading system is time consuming, actually many times it is faster to build own system because there are so many ways to find out how to do something and there are always many ways to do something with programming language. For easy language, once it is more than simple kind, it is always very hard to find out how to do something and it takes so much time and sometimes finally it is just not even possible with easy language limitation. Easy language is not well defined sometimes and documentary normally is not enough. Q and A becomes the only way for easy language and it is very not effective for big project. 4. Even if your trading program cannot help you to make money, the programming skill that you developed may help you get a good programming job especially high income trading system programming job in places like NYC. Build own trading system disadvantage: 1. very time consuming 2. require programming language skill 3. Much more thinking involve for everything in building the system. Using retail system advantage: 1. very fast, just few lines can build a simple strategy 2. graphical stuff, indicators, prices become an unit with day high low close open, reports with all stats...all of these come with the package. 3. more user friendly, no matter the easy language or the whole looking in general. 4. Live trading with some common brokerage api is right there. Retail system disadvantage: 1. once build anything more than simple strategy, may not be possible with that specific easy language, and very hard to find out how to do something or anything complicated with specific easy language. 2. cost 3. may not support anything not common like option, arbitrage, many special data involve that is much more than simple price and volume. 4. Many things are pre defined and there is no way to tell until you find out something wrong and not what you thought it is. There is no code to find out what's wrong and how the programs define many things. All of these are just from my brainstorming, and I wait for your comment!
I tired but it is very hard to understand some other people coding without comments especially if the person is trying to make people to buy the commercial version of the open source one. If you have good experience with open source project, welcome to share!
tradelink has a lot of comments and thousands of unit tests, but yeah with any open source project or coding project in general you will have a learning curve of some sort. unavoidable. though for the most part the point of using an existing platform is that you don't really need to modify much (at the start anyways)
i see. well if you couldn't figure out an open source system on your own chances are you need to be using a commercial system anyways. so whether it's a proprietary/retail platform or just signing up for the commercial version of open source, that is your choice. in both cases you pay fees but in the oss situation you have more flexability and transparency. but realistically if your skills are not where you can utilize an open source codebase and you don't have the budget for programmers then you're probably in the retail segment of the market.
The creator of that open source project wants people to use his commercial version, and he intends to leave no comment and no support for any serious question of the open source project at all. This open source project has many things that I don't need so I can build one that is enough for me but may not need database that is built for extreme fast speed in that open source project.
w/tl guessing you're not a contributor and don't give back to the project cause there's a separate area for project contributors to comment and help each other.
I used 'forex strategy builder' for a while, they're open source, the forum was pretty good at helping users. It's a full application you can use with the GUI, so would only need to look at the source to figure out something is calculated or performed, or add you own features. You can also code your own custom indicators after a slight learning curve (C#, not too difficult to learn). Now they have a pay version, but I think there are enough users to comment and help out using the open source free version. It's called 'forex' but if you get your data in the right format it will work with any instrument like stocks and others.
the goal of the creator is just to make money from the commercial version, that's all. Cannot really call the open source one an active one at all, there isn't any update for open source version and the forum itself is dead with one post in many days. If someone tries to ask a question about how to use the open source version, it is simply no answer from official.