Automated Software for a non-programmer?

Perhaps you will understand-perhaps not. Your education in Math should give to better understanding how to program over others. Say you have a uncut $100,000 Blue Diamond, now you want to cut it then sell it as this was an investment. Now, you going to go around and find the cheapest and easiest way to cut your diamond? Now most people don't know that a uncut diamond worth more most of the time than cut one. Now other than your family, good health comes second and money comes 3rd as it supports our families. You are trying to make an ATM and don't you think it better for you to learn how to do it yourself, cause when something goes wrong, you will know how to do it. NinjaTrader or Tradestation both have good forums with other traders willing to answer questions. If you keep asking the folks who make programming software for changes, they will give it out to the masses, whereas if you program something yourself it remain private.

Much luck.
 
You say you have experience with Matlab. Why not use it? Think a home licence is only like 100$ plus probably another 100$ for the libraries you'll want.

Try google with Matlab and interactive brokers. http://www.mathworks.com/help/trading/interactive-brokers.html?requestedDomain=www.mathworks.com

Theirs information I've seen for even using their IQFeed data plugin if you need a better data feed then IB.


Webinar there with Ernie Chan comparing Matlab, R, and PYthon. Provides some of his benefits of Matlab and some libraries he suggests.

If your familiar with it, give it a go.
 
kmiklas said:
If you're with Interactive Brokers, then you're half-way there. They have a solid API. You can code your stuff in C#, Java, VB, and C++. Check here:
http://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/#gsc.tab=0

Hopefully you've touched one of those languages before, and can code a simple buy/sell algorithm to get started.
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Instead of IB's API, try to consider alternative way as below. IB may NOT be cheapest commission for trading.

1) Web Crawling by C# Selenium (auto trading by web)
2) sikuli (handling any screen) with JAVA and Python

Lots of helpful clips are given in youtube.
 
Sig said:
You may be an exception if you're already an engineer, but the concept of automating without knowing how to program is akin to saying you want to fly a plane without understanding aerodynamics
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Partially right. The process of automating AND programming without a proven method is akin to flying without understanding aerodynamics. There are thousands of programmers for every one good price action trader.
 
profitlocker said:
Partially right. The process of automating AND programming without a proven method is akin to flying without understanding aerodynamics. There are thousands of programmers for every one good price action trader.
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For sure, there's an implicit assumption that the OP does have an edge to automate. He does sound like he has a focus on backtesting though, so he's already going in the right direction.
 
This community is very helpful, I'm glad I dropped in!

I am leaning toward MATLAB as I have a few hundred hours experience coding in that program and I own a license to that software already (although I haven't used it in years).

Do any of you have any resources, libraries, tutorials, classes, or other tools you have used that helped you learn to code automated trading and backtesting programs in MATLAB? My past MATLAB experience includes time-domain and Fourier analysis of two-dimensional arrays ("circuit wave-forms") which I'm certain is very similar to analyzing two-dimensional market time and price data. I'm going to need help navigating more dimensions, and a host of other issues as well I'm sure.

Maybe there is some graduate level finance coursework I can do to hone my skills in this area? Maybe MIT offers an online course that develops some of these techniques?

Please give me some guidance if you can.

Thank you,

Bycote
 
Bycote said:
This community is very helpful, I'm glad I dropped in!

I am leaning toward MATLAB as I have a few hundred hours experience coding in that program and I own a license to that software already (although I haven't used it in years).

Do any of you have any resources, libraries, tutorials, classes, or other tools you have used that helped you learn to code automated trading and backtesting programs in MATLAB? My past MATLAB experience includes time-domain and Fourier analysis of two-dimensional arrays ("circuit wave-forms") which I'm certain is very similar to analyzing two-dimensional market time and price data. I'm going to need help navigating more dimensions, and a host of other issues as well I'm sure.

Maybe there is some graduate level finance coursework I can do to hone my skills in this area? Maybe MIT offers an online course that develops some of these techniques?

Please give me some guidance if you can.

Thank you,

Bycote
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My Matlab experience was the same as yours (EE?) and not terribly helpful for the finance side of things. You'll be tempted to do convert finance data sets to the frequency domain to see what you can find, and by all means give it a try, but it turned into a rabbit hole for me that never panned out. The finance libraries are completely different and to be honest I don't think Matlab is really the optimal platform for the finance world, but if it's what you know then it may be the best option for you.
 
Bycote said:
Do any of you have any resources, libraries, tutorials, classes, or other tools you have used that helped you learn to code automated trading and backtesting programs in MATLAB?
More...

I'll give you some good advice that I wish someone gave me years ago. The best data points to test are event based. Unless you can figure out a way to have a program do it, you need to create an excel spreadsheet, choose a market(s), and manually test data points within the event driven extremes. It's tedious work, but markets don't reward people who avoid the grind.
 
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