here's 2 gigs for you. I have a c# wpf gui and I need it refactored to use caliburn.micro mvvm.
Also, I need the intellij erlang plugin to use rebar3 insterad of rebar.
I guess I didn't understand why you think a straddle is dead money. You can buy/sell a straddle with 6+ months to maturity for a volatility play and exit a few days/weeks after you enter.
most do not use excel for this. Since you can code then program it.
get data timeseries
iterate over it
on each iteration execute your logic
calculate position/pnl/risk ...
reporters call people up and ask for a quote. more likely, the "quoter" calls up the reporter for marketing purposes. Give it a try yourself: call some reporter, give a nonsensical quote, and see if it will be published ...(jerky boys)
no you would not need to learn another language. as a finance student you would probably come across as an idiot if you said (or thought) you knew java or c++
since you're a finance student just learn python. you dont even really need to know python that well just learn this library and you can do a lot: http://pandas.pydata.org/
cheapest would be to open an IB account and listen for top 50 advancers/decliners. Downloading a realtime stream doesnt make sense. maybe a snapshot is what you're thinking