Marketcetera vs Tradelink

E

earlyexit

I was wondering if anyone out there has used or investigated both of these Open Source platforms? I'm currently weighing the options and trying to figure out which one to go with. While my equity strategies are not ultra low latency, they are HFT. Either platform would be able to handle it. Important to note, I'm trying to minimize the amount of programming I have to do or get someone to do.


Tradelink Pros/Cons
-------------------------
* They have a built in connector to Genesis.
* No built in connection with FIX.
* No position manager built in.
* Open source community seems pretty active.


Marketcetera Pros/Cons
------------------------------
* Pay a subscription and get connectors to FIX, Lime, and a few others.
* Has a built in position manager.
* Open source community seems to be pretty inactive. While it is still being developed, it seems to be at a much slower pace.
* Software is geared more for HFT.


Because of the pros/cons to each of them. I guess I'm hoping to hear experiences from others. Why they went with one or the other (or neither). I realize writing everything from scratch is the way to go for many of you. However, that is just not practical for my situation.

Any input would be great.


Thanks.
 
I haven't looked at either for a while so this may be out of date and is largely subjective.:

1)

TradeLink: C#/.NET
Marketcetera: Java/Ruby

Many people will decide based on this factor alone.

2)

TradeLink: Since 2008
Marketcetera: Since around 2005? with backing by a commercial co.

3)

TradeLink: More in common with commercial packages such as OpenQuant, NinjaTrader et al.

Marketcetera: Doesn't have a commercial analogue that I'm aware of, more focused on distributed trading infrastructure so that you don't have to worry about building your own from scratch.

4)

TradeLink: Probably more active community these days, large support for numerous brokers and data feeds, being used by retail traders, prop traders and institutions...

Marketcetera: Didn't really seem to take off in the retail trading community - like ET, but probably being used mainly by non-retail end-users i.e. hedge funds etc. ( This is just speculation )

5)

TradeLink: implement an interface or sub-class something and override a method and you can have your trading logic ready to run pretty shortly with your choice of broker and data feed ( again, haven't looked at this in a long time)

Marketcetera: Have to figure out how to contain and model your trading logic from scratch - not a big deal if you are a competent programmer. It was quite straight forward to drop in Esper for example (when I last looked at it about 4 years ago!)

------------------

In short, I suspect it will be easier for you to go with TradeLink, unless you wanted the multi-platform Java solution that Marketcetera offers and/or your skill/knowledge area is more Java oriented and/or there are specific Java libraries you wanted to leverage that don't have a .NET equivalent...yet.

Allegedly you can run TradeLink on Linux under Mono but do you really want that headache?

I'll bet the TradeLink guy will post here very shortly with more information for you...
 
byteme comments are very knowledgable and reflect most of what we know and hear from users.

1) yes.

.net is a VM and there are many language implementations for it (including java and ruby). We don't have reports or knowledge of people attempting these two languages. vb/c++/f# and c# are in active use.

2) PM for more info.

3) TL has both infrastructure component (aka "the appkit" : api, common, appkit,research), that includes two transports and ability to build custom GUIs or GUI-less apps. for convenience and for new users it also includes open-source off-the-shelf tools that are comparable to platforms byteme mentions.

4) PM for more info.

5) this is what we hear most from users.

We know there are users who have successfully run on linux/unix with mono, because on the list we've seen live strategy bug reports come in from unix. These were submitted anonymously so we're still trying to collect more information about who has had success. There is a already a mono patch file available a number of users have built, join the users list if you need more information around unix/linux/mono work in TL.

google tradelink project or tradelink.org for more info
 
Thanks Byteme, that is very helpful.

I'll keep playing around with them. They both have their problems. Just a matter of figuring out which one has fewer.
 
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