For my own trading, developing trading systems:
Backtesting speed (without survivorship bias)
As a tester of systematic approaches since 1999 (albeit with serious naivety then) I'm amazed with the performance of off-the-shelf software can do these days.
Previously, an iteration of "change the trading system to do X" would take several to (several) dozens of minutes to see the result. I remember in about 2002 I did this sort of testing and it would take about 3-4 hours to complete.
These days, I can test a trading system on Russell 3000 constituents (11K stocks) back 30+ years on daily data and it will take less than a minute.
This is a game changer in systematic trading.
%%Do you know the thing about software like SAP, it's basically fixed and you have to change the business to the software, anyone trying to change the software to the business progressively fails, it's designed to work at $1mil revenue per employee where the more you change it the lower that number becomes.
Now what if trading were no different, there was a fixed set of dynamics and if you try and change the software to the business the probability of failure increases, where the more you adapt the software the more it decreases your revenue per employee, so many what ifs.




If you could design your own trading software, what key features would you prioritize?