Which language to learn

E

elliots11

Which language to learn if one wants to do automated trading and backtesting in either stocks or futures? How would you go about learning the language? Community college or university courses? On line videos? Please weigh in.

Also, how would you determine that the backtesting results are not due to randomness?

Thank you for sharing.
 
My vote is for C++, it can do pretty much everything and does it blazingly fast.

I would suggest MATLAB, but it is very expensive unless you work for a company or attend a university that offers a license for you. My first language was MATLAB, and it made the transitions to C/C++ pretty easy for me.

Python seems to be incredibly popular right now, so that would be my 2nd place suggestion for you to learn (and probably most people's opinion).

There are a wealth of "teach yourself" articles for every programming language online, no need to buy expensive books purely to learn how to program. If you're a reasonably sharp individual, you could probably be writing simple programs after an hour or two of study.

Keep in mind that "coding" is just a tool, the real challenge is coming up with what the code is supposed to do (which is where STEM degrees come in handy)
 
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That being said, developing a trading platform "from scratch" is very time consuming (I've been at it for a couple years). You may want to just look into one of the scripting langues that are available with various commercial trading platforms
 
Above answers are good.

3 not so easy tasks:

1) learn to manually trade profitably; *
2) become a competent programmer;
3) automate using 1 and 2.


elliots11 said:
Also, how would you determine that the backtesting results are not due to randomness?
More...

Hypothesis-led, sufficient sample size and breadth, out-of-sample testing, forward testing.


* assuming you have (1) covered?
 
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Have you traded discretionary positions before? Have you been profitable over the past 1-3 years? If not then forget systematic trading. There are enough stooges everywhere and especially on this website: frustrated former IT and computer science majors (among the many other mediocre people here) who hate their jobs and believe trading is their life calling. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of those guys try for a year or two and give up frustrated because they might understand the technology side and may be expert coders but they lack knowledge of market intrinsic, order book dynamics, trading patterns, fundamentals. They think they can pick up a book and read a bit about technical analysis and make a living. Bollocks. Look at all the losers on this website.

If you can prove to yourself that you can make money by making the right trading decisions then you can take the next step and automate your thought process. Before that you should not even touch a systematic trading platform, much less program it.

This is most likely the best advice you will get regarding this topic.



elliots11 said:
Which language to learn if one wants to do automated trading and backtesting in either stocks or futures? How would you go about learning the language? Community college or university courses? On line videos? Please weigh in.

Also, how would you determine that the backtesting results are not due to randomness?

Thank you for sharing.
More...
 
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