How Do You Build Systems Using Python?

Good question.
It's a good idea to understand programming if you want to trade systematically - even if you have no intention of actually building your trading system from scratch.
So learning a language for which there are extensive finance libraries to aid building a system and to learn the ropes is invaluable.
And you are right, Python is one of those languages - but it is not the only one.

Starting at Quantopian is a great idea, even if you have no intention of trading stocks. It will show you what the foundation of a trading system looks like. And with that knowledge you can incrementally augment your design and development skills to build what you like yourself.
And in any case, I understand you can now use your own data to integrate other products.

Try to keep your systems simple (whilst avoiding rookie mistakes). With luck you have a chance of succeeding. Above all, reign in your expectations. Consider your efforts a resounding success if you manage to retain your capital intact ove your first 5 year period.
Targetting 20% returns per month will only guarantee a blowout. Pretty quickly - if that's any consolation.

In my opinion, most people are too afraid of making mistakes, of somehow "looking bad". School and work promotes such fears every day: At school, pupils are expected to simply regurgitate what other people discovered through trial-and-error themselves, and to avoid attempting to create alternative answers themselves. At work, workers are expected to keep in line and bow their heads, as anything else is risky and rarely worth the potential trouble, especially for cross-cutting concerns.

How costly is the mistake? If it's endurable and don't affect you too much - both psychologically and financially, it's GOOD to recognize a mistake and correct it. In fact, being able to rapidly recognize and fix your mistakes is paramount, as I doubt anybody will be able to create a viable system without it. So be honest, ie. with yourself, otherwise one gets stuck in far-fetched fantasies of making millions or being able to make perfect designs/processes up-front, which is not realistic at all.
 
metatrader is fine for running a strategy or two. Once you start running few; the system will start to slow down, and execution latency adds up a lot. Metatrader is single threaded and can only process one order per 200ms. market data also has latency; especially during peak times.

The other major reason why I moved to java; is debugging a trading system.
Assuming a systems does not need much of data apart from one day old data/screen technical levels what difference it can make whether it is MT4 or Java? Do you use any specific platform or broker that has option to run your java based system or you have an API in java which calls from the broker's trading platform? So if you have a good broker (non-Mt4) will have will have no issues in latency/execution?
 
Does MT4 support various machine learning algorithms?
I am not sure it is now in MT4. I gather in MT5 there are some options for API or DLL development which can be incorporated. I have not used MT5 much.
 
to all the so called experts ...
agileJokeWaterFall.jpg
 
@lylec305 you still haven't cited any research that proves R is more "profitable" for trading compared to Python. Instead you post silly memes, does that convince anyone?
 
Assuming a systems does not need much of data apart from one day old data/screen technical levels what difference it can make whether it is MT4 or Java? Do you use any specific platform or broker that has option to run your java based system or you have an API in java which calls from the broker's trading platform? So if you have a good broker (non-Mt4) will have will have no issues in latency/execution?

java can run on any pc just like mt4 or python. u can run it in a hosted environment or at home pc.

there are API libraries available to connect you to brokers; such as FIX
 
@lylec305 you still haven't cited any research that proves R is more "profitable" for trading compared to Python. Instead you post silly memes, does that convince anyone?
silly post for all you silly programming wizards in here. You cannot profit from programming alone. An analogy would be learning to speak a language, once you learn or read book, you do not become an expert technical writer. Usually a technical writer is not a SME. OK i'm throwing around a TLA just like you experts. But i won't do that. sme is a subject matter expert, tla is a three letter acronym. hahaha. I started as a systems programmer, then analyst prog and worked with SME quants, diagram/programming algos and beyond. Learn python then learn C, most api's are written in C/C+. Knowledge of a programming language by itself is only profitable when applied to a winning strategy. If you cannot trade profitably without programming, it's not going to help. It takes about 2+ years to become somewhat fluent in any programming language. Retired CTO, pursuing personal interest in trading algos.
 
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