Quote from mrvizion:
I really dislike the idea of advertising for companies on public forums, but do a search on volume weighted average price and algorithmic trading. As far as software goes I prefer custom made solutions. Although if you're not seeking to do anything outrageous a few multi-threaded dll's in tradestation or some other similar trading framework might work out for you just fine. You probably could even get away with using some of the popular scientific computing environments, but eventually custom will be the way to go.
Interestingly how vwma would be used for trading forex 24/7?
Q
Climbing the Algorithmic Learning Curve
http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=42700086
Traders use the models to obtain the returns of certain benchmarks - the most common of which is volume weighted average price (VWAP). But brokers offer strategies beyond the simple VWAP. "They've gotten far more complex and far more advanced than a simple volume weighted price model," says John Wheeler, vice president and director of U.S. equity trading at American Century in Kansas City. Strategies offered by brokers include: time weighted average price (TWAP), the previous night's close and implementation shortfall - a model that weighs the urgency of executing a trade against the risk of moving the stock.
"The whole game is about balancing time versus impact," while staying within the client's constraints for price, time and volume, explains Dan Mathisson, global head of advanced execution services (AES) at Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB). There is a trade-off between "stretching out [the trade] versus how much impact it will incur, and picking the right times to be executing the stocks," he adds.
Major brokerage houses offer the algorithmic-trading strategies, which in most cases have been designed by their quantitative analysts and financial engineers. According to The Tabb Group's survey, the major suppliers are Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Additionally, Investment Technology Group has been offering algorithmic trading since the '90s. But a slew of other marquee names are currently jumping on the bandwagon, including Banc of America Securities, BNY Brokerage, Citigroup and Lehman Brothers, among others. Other sources include buy-side quantitative analysts that create their own algorithms and third-party vendors like FlexTrade Systems and Portware, which offer canned algorithms and tools to develop customized algorithms.
"The advantage of a platform like Portware is that we can write our own algorithms for effective trading tactics," says Michel Debiche, president and CEO of Quantia Capital Management in Princeton, N.J., which runs an equity statistical arbitrage fund that does automated trading.
Despite the hype over algorithmic trading, for many buy-side traders, it is not the only electronic tool they utilize. When First Quadrant's Bui evaluates her order flow, she still negotiates big orders through crossing networks and floor brokers who give her market looks - prices from the floor. She uses the VWAP strategy from Instinet, the institutional agency broker, for her "clean-up orders" - the residual that is left over from bigger trades. "They're more like passive orders," Bui explains. Other brokers have offered her VWAP strategies, but Bui has declined because she believes VWAP strategies and crossing networks do basically the same thing.
UQ