QUESTION about hiring a programmer to automate your trading

[DBTrading]

Quote from Thunderdog:

I have a question for those of you without programming knowledge who have hired a programmer to automate your trading. Do you not essentially give up your strategy in all of its detail to a stranger who can then use it for himself and potentially pass it on to others?

Lately, I have been toying with the idea of either learning a programming language or hiring a programmer. Since I know nothing about programming, I suspect that this would be an onerous undertaking from start to finish. Hiring someone and disclosing my strategy in its entirety, on the other hand, strikes me as entirely unacceptable.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has come to this crossroads and how he or she dealt with it.

Thunderdog,

I signed up for these forums for the exact purpose of help with programming. I took one C++ class in college years ago, so I have practically no experience. I have, however, decided to bite the bullet and write a program.

I am using Anvil trading software and there seem to be many experienced Anvil programmers on here. So far I have downloaded Microsoft Visual C++, the language you apparently need for Anvil. There was a useful programming wizard in eSignal, but that is programmed in JavaScript. There seem to be many free C++ help guides on the the web. My broker also supposedly has good API (advanced programming interface) support. And from the way they make it sound, have helped countless traders.

It has taken me a couple hours to get started and pointed in the right direction, and I am currently staring at a blank Visual page. But there are countless resources out there. You can always copy and paste partial code for debugging on here too. A really solid trading program, to me, is just way too profitable to pass up.

Good luck!

 

[RedDuke]

Hi Thunderdog,

Learning how to program correctly and efficiently is no easy task and will take you a long time. Your best bet is to partner with someone and make it a trading/profiting arrangement. This way, he will depend on your ideas and will guard the system since it is in his bets interest.

He can of course part you once it is set and done, but it is not really always all set and done. Plus you can hold off on some details and add them yourself. This would still require learning, but it would be much easier then doing it from scratch.

Regards,
redduke

 

[eagle]

Instead of designing a hard coded rules, if we tell the programmer to make a room for changes, say parameters X, Y, Z have to be set by user and then he won't be able to guess what will be the exact rules.

 

[Thunderdog]

Thanks to all for the continued response to my thread. However, judging by my technological ineptitide and generalized paranoia, I think I am destined to continue pushing the button myself during RTH. And it is a shame, since my trading follows objective, quantifiable critieria which I have been trading manually to positive effect. Unfortunately, I do not know any programmers personally, and I don't think I can leave some variables out which I can then plug in later myself, since I use no indicators, relying exclusively on price action. And from the look and sound of things, I doubt I will ever learn to code sufficiently well. And so, my trading will remain manual labor. For now.

Thanks again to everyone kind enough to participate in this thread.

 

[eagle]

Any good software won't come with hard coded settings. It comes with user-friendly interface for settings by end-user and it for everybody to be able to use who doesn't need to know anything about programming. For example, the cellphone does provide user-friendly setting interface.

It turned out that a non-programmer exploit the features rich phone very well than the programmer. Because the programmer lose time on complaining why it's this way or that way, it should be this way, etc. Then he finally got bored. While the non-programmer just enjoy the features and continue to exploit them.

 

[Shreddog]

Quote from RedDuke:

Hi Thunderdog,

Learning how to program correctly and efficiently is no easy task and will take you a long time. Your best bet is to partner with someone and make it a trading/profiting arrangement. This way, he will depend on your ideas and will guard the system since it is in his bets interest.

He can of course part you once it is set and done, but it is not really always all set and done. Plus you can hold off on some details and add them yourself. This would still require learning, but it would be much easier then doing it from scratch.

Regards,
redduke

This is an excellent suggestion. I have in fact done this in the past (as the programmer). As long as the edge has room for 2 or some agreement to not step on each other this can be a win-win.

 

[tommaso]

Quote from eagle:

Any good software won't come with hard coded settings. It comes with user-friendly interface for settings by end-user and it for everybody to be able to use who doesn't need to know anything about programming. For example, the cellphone does provide user-friendly setting interface.

[...] Then he finally got bored. While the non-programmer just enjoy the features and continue to exploit them.

That's certainly true.

On the other hand, a smart programmer *could* implement some algorithm (from random "brute force" to some branch and bound or gradient based or whatever combinations of these methods) to explore a sample of the set of all combinations of parameters (settings).

And this could probably lead to a better solution (strategy) than the user has. This would anyway be a different one, and probably would not arm the user.

T

-----------------------------------
G-Bot Automated Day Trading System Project
http://www.datatime.eu/public/gbot/

 

[bankroll]

Quote from Thunderdog:

I have a question for those of you without programming knowledge who have hired a programmer to automate your trading. Do you not essentially give up your strategy in all of its detail to a stranger who can then use it for himself and potentially pass it on to others?

I wouldn't be that worried about that. Richard Dennis ('father' of Turtle Traders) famously said you can publish your trading rules in the newspaper and nobody will follow them. And even if your programmer follows then what?

To continue on this thinking - can you hire a programmer for free who shares your interest in trading and his reward is not a fixed amount but some kind of a profit sharing either through trading or through a joint venture deal?

Additionally what are the best practices to hire and manage a programmer for your trading - either by the traditional paid by project model or if you can agree with him on the profit sharing model? In the latter case won't he be more lazy compared when he works for a salary or it depends on who you manage to find?

 

[bluematrix]

There are many ways to overcome this problem.

for example the application can expose most of the variables on the form so the users configures it. for example a moving average - the user can input the number of period. same for any other variables or calculations. If it's intraday, again the cycles can be set by the user e.g. every x minutes.

if you're interested and have an account with IB, PM me and I'll build it for you.