Best algo trade platform for Interactive Broker?

[Kris]

I've used both Trade-Ideas and Trade Navigator to autotrade at IB.

Trade Ideas was great in the sense that it will scan the entire market/watchlist for my setup and when it sees it will execute on however many candidates it finds. It will instantly buy 10 stocks at once if that's what it sees. The issue with Trade Ideas is that none of the indicators are configurable, so it's extremely limited in the system you can create.

Trade Navigator is great because you can configure whatever type of technical indicators or trading system you want, not really many boundaries here. The problem is you have to assign your system to one ticker. It won't scan the market for your setup and take multiple positions at once.

What I'm looking for is the flexibility of system creation that Trade Navigator gives with the ability to scan the entire market and take multiple setups at once. Any recommendations?

 

[WealthSignals]

Hi, What automated trading platform do you recommend for IB?

- will implement my trading strategy
- programming language C#

If you can't do what you need to do with the Strategy Wizard, the guys at Wealth-Lab (C#) are very helpful (free support)! U.S. residents can autotrade with a qualified account and $0 commissions at Fidelity, where you get Wealth-Lab for free. Others can trade using Wealth-Lab at IB with an extension available from a third party at ib-automated-trading.com. An added bonus with Wealth-Lab is that you can publish trading signals at WealthSignals.com

 

[Glitch]

Quantacula Studio, C# or drag and drop strategy creation, connection to IB, extendable architecture so can consume different data feeds and potentially connect to other brokers. Stellar backtesting.

 

[marwanco]

well, every platform has their advantages and disadvantages... it all depends on what you are planning to trade. Some things to consider:

• portfolios: if you are planning to trade only a single instrument, or a basket where the instruments are totally independent, most platforms will do. If you are planning to trade a portfolio, with an overarching money-management, only few platforms will make this enjoyable.
• account types: if you are planning to trade only a single account, you will probably be ok whenever the box says it supports IB. If you are planning to trade multiple accounts as a money-manager, things look sad.
• trading types: if you need fully automated trading, you will need a platform that can interface with IB. However, if you are trading only once per day, you might have more options. In this case you would only need to have access to IB's account status, and could then write out a basket file, which you import into TWS' Basket Trader with just two mouse clicks.
• reports: most platforms will create some report for you. However, if you need fully configurable reports, with specialized metrics, and additional plots, choices are slim.
• data sources: every platform will connect with some data source, but maybe not the one that you would like to use. Data are crucial, and many data sources are not properly adjusted for dividends, which makes them unusuable for strategies running across dividend cycles.

I am the maintainer of TuringTrader, which is an open-source backtesting engine written in C#. I wrote this, because of my specific needs which MultiCharts, NinjaTrader, QuantConnect and some others did not address. I am using this platform for all of the model portfolios I run for my firm, submitting several thousand orders per year... using the basket file method outlined above.


Cheers, Felix

Which way to go if I want to count how many ticks are executed per second?

 

[pstrusi]

How about IB's own API?

It's not an easy task for beginners, but no only that, the IB-API is often very confusing, even for Pros. I don't understand why so complicated when you have just to wrap data coming from the pipe. I'm still building very slowly mine. Are you Pro? Did you finish with something stable?
What language did you choose? ( please no python )

I'm used to C and C# as a beginner, but I hear very often many complains about IB-API in C# flavor.

I appreciate any suggestion from your experience.

 

[pstrusi]

well, every platform has their advantages and disadvantages... it all depends on what you are planning to trade. Some things to consider:

• portfolios: if you are planning to trade only a single instrument, or a basket where the instruments are totally independent, most platforms will do. If you are planning to trade a portfolio, with an overarching money-management, only few platforms will make this enjoyable.
• account types: if you are planning to trade only a single account, you will probably be ok whenever the box says it supports IB. If you are planning to trade multiple accounts as a money-manager, things look sad.
• trading types: if you need fully automated trading, you will need a platform that can interface with IB. However, if you are trading only once per day, you might have more options. In this case you would only need to have access to IB's account status, and could then write out a basket file, which you import into TWS' Basket Trader with just two mouse clicks.
• reports: most platforms will create some report for you. However, if you need fully configurable reports, with specialized metrics, and additional plots, choices are slim.
• data sources: every platform will connect with some data source, but maybe not the one that you would like to use. Data are crucial, and many data sources are not properly adjusted for dividends, which makes them unusuable for strategies running across dividend cycles.

I am the maintainer of TuringTrader, which is an open-source backtesting engine written in C#. I wrote this, because of my specific needs which MultiCharts, NinjaTrader, QuantConnect and some others did not address. I am using this platform for all of the model portfolios I run for my firm, submitting several thousand orders per year... using the basket file method outlined above.


Cheers, Felix

Interesting project. Let me ask you something: why did you choose C# and not for example plain C?

 

[HobbyTrading]

Are you Pro?

No, I'm an amateur retail investor.

Did you finish with something stable?

Yes, I'm running my own software 24/5 since 5+ years.

What language did you choose?

Java, as that was the only one of the available API versions I more or less understood when I started developing my own software.

 

[BlackPhoenix]

Interfacing with the API is quite small part of developing a full fledged trading platform. In my experience a lot of time goes into developing frameworks for backtesting, parameter optimization, strategy development, portfolio generation, etc. which is API agnostic. I'm using C++ because I have extensive C++ software development background, but I don't think it really matters which language you use since the actual live trading isn't performance intensive. For parameter optimization using a high performance language helps though, where C++ can be quite useful.

 

[QuantVPS]

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