Quote from GloriaBrown:
I have these simple comparison and welcome to give any comment:
Build own trading system advantage:
1. you would know exactly everything and every step, no per-define stuff that always happens in retail trading system, so the chance to have some definition wrong to have wrong outcome would be minimum.
2. There are a lot things especially more complicated stuff that retail trading system just not designed to do that, so self made trading system gives the best flexibility and basically can make anything that in your mind really happens.
3. Even though build own trading system is time consuming, actually many times it is faster to build own system because there are so many ways to find out how to do something and there are always many ways to do something with programming language. For easy language, once it is more than simple kind, it is always very hard to find out how to do something and it takes so much time and sometimes finally it is just not even possible with easy language limitation. Easy language is not well defined sometimes and documentary normally is not enough. Q and A becomes the only way for easy language and it is very not effective for big project.
4. Even if your trading program cannot help you to make money, the programming skill that you developed may help you get a good programming job especially high income trading system programming job in places like NYC.
Build own trading system disadvantage:
1. very time consuming
2. require programming language skill
3. Much more thinking involve for everything in building the system.
Using retail system advantage:
1. very fast, just few lines can build a simple strategy
2. graphical stuff, indicators, prices become an unit with day high low close open, reports with all stats...all of these come with the package.
3. more user friendly, no matter the easy language or the whole looking in general.
4. Live trading with some common brokerage api is right there.
Retail system disadvantage:
1. once build anything more than simple strategy, may not be possible with that specific easy language, and very hard to find out how to do something or anything complicated with specific easy language.
2. cost
3. may not support anything not common like option, arbitrage, many special data involve that is much more than simple price and volume.
4. Many things are pre defined and there is no way to tell until you find out something wrong and not what you thought it is. There is no code to find out what's wrong and how the programs define many things.
All of these are just from my brainstorming, and I wait for your comment!