automated trading systems/programming/back testing

Hi
Although I have been trading for many years, I have never programmed a single line in my life, and now I am interested in creating automated trading systems and also do automated back testing.

My question is, what system should I learn and use? And also where is the best place to start learning? any newbie thread or article that is a good place to start?

What system? MT4? trade station? Ninja? or?????

What system is mostly used and has most free resources (code sharing etc)?

Any common programming language that can be used on several platforms?

I assume MT4 is only for FX? is there anything I can use for both FX and futures?

Any input very much appreciated!

By the way, I definately do realize it will take me a lot of time and effort to learn programming etc, just looking for where to start.
Thank you
Andy

MT4 is a popular free platform that has lot's of code available for it. It's easy to learn and there are lot's of examples. A good place to start is http://book.mql4.com/ You'll find lot's of people both here and at forex-tsd.com who know mql4 and can help with questions. Some non-US brokers have CFDs for some futures and stocks. See FXPro.com and Alphari.

NinjaTrader is a more advanced trading software built around Microsoft C#/.NET platform. It's free for demo trading, but will cost you for live trading. There are lot's of resources for learning C# but none that are dedicated to scripting NinjaTrader that I know of. You can start at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...8VS.71%29.aspx for learning the basics of C#

I would recommend you to use MT4 as your trading platform, programming is not hard and you can also find a bunch on programmers that will do the hard work for you for a few bucks. Nevertheless, on the down side you will limited to Forex.

Asking people on Forex Factory if they like MT4 is like asking a fox if they like the taste of chicken. Almost everyone here uses it. If you do, you will be locked into Forex only and you have to trade through some crappy little forex broker with questionable data. Little brokers support MT4 for a reason and that reason is not you.

Contrary to the statement above, NinjaTrader is free even if you trade live assuming you use certain brokers. They have a 950 page user manual of which about 800 pages are dedicated to explaining the programming language. They also have an active user forum and there are programmers who are quite adept at programming in their language.

TradeStation uses a proprietary language but most programmers I know recognize it immediately and start programming right away. They have an extensive library and dictionary of programming terms. You can trade stocks, options, forex, futures, e-minis, a few foreign markets, and you can feed in your own data if that doesn't work for you. Their data is very clean and not corrupted. This is often overlooked by budding programmers. In TradeStation 9, they will support other programming languages which will open up a whole new world of programming possibilities. They also have a very solid backtesting and optimization engine.

Thank you all very much for your very useful answers to my question above.

What about security with these solutions? Is the logic saved only on my computer, or is it transferred to a server somewhere, where someone else can access it?

So, MT4, Ninja and Tradestation are the alternatives so far. Is there any other I should consider, and if so, why?

I'm currently using Interactive Brokers as a broker and on their webpage it says "Our APIs are available for DDE for Excel, Java, C++, and ActiveX."
Does anyone have experience with them?

Is C++ a lot harder to learn than C#?

Thanks again for any input!
Andy

Your code resides on your computer. I can't help you with that API and DLL stuff. Honestly, I pay a guy $100/hr to program and I do other things with my life.

You can use ActiveX with C#, beyond that I wouldn't touch Interactive Brokers API with a barge pole (for reasons, just read though any of the on-line boards dedicated to it), which is a shame as their rates are good.

Phil and Craig

thank you again for your inputs.

It looks like it's Ninja or Tradestation for me.

I'm loking to do intraday-strategies with logic such as for example:
if moving average X crosses moving average Y at the same time as
moving average Z is above moving average Q AND it is currently Wednessday or Thursday between 8.00 am and 14.00 hours, then go long.

For this kind of programming, which of the two systems are best in your opinion?

which one is best in terms of accuracy of:

1. execution
2.back testing (if back testing shorter timeframe systems accuracy would be a major issue)

Thank you again for sharing you knowledge and opinions

Andy

I cannot tell you about Tradestation but I can tell you that I write indicators and auto traders for NT and it is VERY good. You do not have this data quality issue garbage you have with MT4, I test all of my stuff on actual 1-tick charts and have NO issues. NT is very nice then again I have not written anything for MT4 or Tradestation

Thank you Richard

I saw on forums that people had problems with backtesting using tick data on NT. Anything you experienced?
Which broker do you use with them?
A lot of complaints about interactive brokers, so I guess I wont be able to use them...
Many mention that ZenFire feed is good for NT, but have not figured out yet how to get it, or which broker has it.

Thank you
Andy

One thing to keep in mind with NT (which may or may not be important to you) is that NT (at least when I was using it) does not persist it's strategy setups between sessions, every time you restart NT you have to reenter your setups, which I found quite annoying and error prone. However the C# aspect of NT is very good and it does shield you from the IB API. I based a lot of my own designs on mimicking the NT class hierarchy.

What if I leave the computer on 24/7, will I still need to re-enter setups every new day?

Nope, but my experience was that NT will crap out eventually. (I used to get feed errors on L2, the IB data stream is notorious for crapping out).