I talk a lot about the importance of building your trading plan. The same thing applies for building a trading robot or an expert advisor.

Most people approach EA development as digging frantically looking for huge gold nuggets. That approach is a good way to waste a lot of time and money.

Most people dive into the process without considering the details. The purpose of this post is to slow everything down so that you can develop some sort of business plan for your trading.

Steps to building a trading robot

Three long, difficult steps are involved with deploying a trading robot. You first need to obtain data for testing. A good strategy, once discovered, then needs to be programmed to automatically place trades. 最後に, you need to select a broker to execute the orders in the live market.

The importance of data

A good number of traders brag about their best trades. One trade gave them a million dollar profit and other such and such.

What newbie system traders don’t realize is the tedious process of how these people reached their status. Knowing whether or not a system has an edge or not entails researching your idea using historical price data. Here are some tips that you can use when looking for data:

• You need to get data, you need to analyze it, and then you need to trade it. It is really simple on the surface, but when you are trying to go about this, every step creates huge obstacles. The easiest work around is to use the trading platforms listed at the bottom of the article.

• If you are looking for free options, you might go look somewhere like Yahoo! Finance where you can get data on lots of stuff that is mostly end of day prices. It’s no good for high frequency. You can get some options data, you can get forex and you can get some indices and some futures data.

• The reason why data quality is important is when we go on to analyze and come up with potential ways that you might want to trade algorithmically, if you have garbage data, you have a garbage analysis. Be very careful about the data that you decide to accept.

Problems gathering data

Now that we learned how important data is, we now discuss the other side of the picture in data gathering which is its disadvantages.

• Unreliable. Sometimes it’s just wrong. Sometimes there are duplicate entries. Sometimes there are gaps in the data that are unexplained. And if you don’t really know what you’re looking for, what kind of problems there might be in the data, you can come up with some weird discoveries.

• Delays. Technology bridges the information gap. しかし、時, due to time differences and the most annoying part when your broker or you are having problems on your internet connection at times, delays are inevitable.

• Clutter. There are a gazillion sources of information on the internet. This equates to a huge amount of data. Different brokers have their own set of websites and blogs which displays various analyses on a single instrument. It will now be a problem on what data will you consider credible and useful in your trade. 時々, analysts just anticipate most especially technical analysts posting price forecasts and so on. Those who waits for news like Unemployment rate has their own views on figures that will show up prior and during the announcement which basically creates clutter.

The Trading Platform

When you trade online, a trading platform is like your playing field. It is the software through which you manage your trades when you open, close or set limits or stops. 通常, a trading platform is provided by the broker.

There are platforms, APIs and all sorts of different companies that offer data and trading capabilities all in the same product. The advantage to those types of software is that it makes your life a lot easier because if you go about this on your own it’s a monumental task.

A lot of people that like to play with R, and you can just custom program your own research platform. Matlab and R are the most common tools in this category. The problem is that you have to build the trading components entirely on your own.

Here are some popular platforms MetaTrader, NinjaTrader, ThinkorSwim and Multicharts. All these platforms use their own different language and solve the data problem. They also include the ability to trade automatically. Most of the heavy lifting has already been done.

MetaTrader uses a custom language called MQL4, which is really a C Scripting Language. NinjaTrader uses C# .NET 3.5. Trade Station and Multicharts is a language called EasyLanguage, which for programmers will probably bore you to tears. To understand more about these platforms, you can check different brokers and their offerings.

Trading Platforms and data

We’ve covered the languages, the markets they cover and then, the other problem is really data. These platforms offer very different set-ups and they all handle the data problem differently.

メタト レーダー

MetaTrader is kind of like the AK-47 of Trade Platforms. You download it and it doesn’t matter how novice or not good with computers you are. You will have a hard time not figuring out how to work the platform. It is simple, it’s very friendly. It’s also not sophisticated.

If you’re trying to do something sophisticated, that’s probably not the place to be. And for your analysis, you have to be very careful, because when you download MetaTrader, charts just pop up. You think, “Oh this is great, I got my data and everything looks good”, but the problem is that most of the time the data is junk. You can’t actually rely on it and do any serious analysis.

Getting the data and getting it formatted to MetaTrader is the most convoluted, difficult problem that traders face everyday. This is the platform that we deal with and everybody has problems with their backtesting and getting familiar.

This is good enough if you want to trade every couple of minutes and you’re not super execution sensitive and you are just trying to get something out cheaply. If you try every 4 hours and you trade 3 通貨, MetaTrader is fantastic for that.

But if you try to day trade or trade 20 different currencies at the same time, that’s a disaster, because MT4 isn’t multi-threaded. Every time you push an order into the market, MT4 can only handle it one at a time.

ある場合 5 orders firing off together, this one has to finish, and you have all the latency in the middle where they connect and then bounce and the trade confirms okay. Now you repeat the process four more times to get all 5 trades filled. If you’re pushing too many orders through, MT4 will choke.

NinjaTrader

You have to find somebody to give you the data. There are some paid options, there are some, there’s one that’s free called Kinetick, and they give you end of day data. Brokerages also provide limited historical data. The quantity varies substantially from broker to broker.

The problem when you’re programming all this stuff and you’re trading in the live market, if you program to a broker specific platform, you probably spend 4 宛先 6 months developing and testing it and getting it working, and a lot of money and time. If you go to start trading live and you’re not happy with the broker, too bad. You married them.

What NinjaTrader did is, let’s say that there are Brokers A, B and C. NinjaTrader sits on top to bridge everything together.

NinjaTrader is an API shoved on top of multiple broker APIs so that you can write your strategy in NinjaTrader. They’ve done all the integration with every broker partner they have.

It’s a different way to handle the same problem as MetaTrader. MetaTrader just goes to these brokers and say “You should use our platform”. If you developed in MetaTrader, you can go switch on a whim.

If you have NinjaTrader, you can go switch on a whim. The difference is that you don’t just have NinjaTrader. You have to download the broker platform, then you download NinjaTrader. その後、, you get everything hooked up and make sure everything plays nicely together.

There’s a steep learning curve with getting this all set-up to the point where you can actually download historical data and start trading with your broker. Once you have the data set-up, しかし, NinjaTrader is awesome.

TradeStation and Multicharts

TradeStation and Multicharts offer the same quality of analytics as NinjaTrader. They are easier to develop in. Obtaining data quickly makes these platforms easier for testing trading robots.

If you program with TradeStation, you trade with Trade Station. You can’t go trade with anybody else. しかし, if you’re ever unsatisfied with the broker because they slip you or because they charge bad commissions or whatever goes wrong with your trading, you don’t have any alternative. You’d have to move to MultiCharts or to redevelop the programming completely from scratch in another platform.

The Broker

Remember that your broker is your trading partner. It provides you the platform, data and most importantly the access in the market. Brokers are also service providers, and traders are their customers. It’s common for a customer to encounter some difficulties regarding the provider. There are two common reasons why a customer sometimes feels dissatisfied.

• First, bad service. When you are having difficulties opening your platform to execute a trade, you call on a customer service representative. And just like any other companies, a structured way of handling complaints will be given to you. Sometimes they can’t just give you what you need because they do not want to understand what you need.

• The second reason is bad execution. The broker is the market maker. They set the buying and selling prices at every single second. When you place a trade, they can present prices that are favorable to them. トレーダーとして, when you know that the trend is on your side, sometimes you do not mind trading few pips higher or lower than your order. So you grab the offer. Until you realize that the broker made some hefty spread on your trades. This affects the trader emotionally and emotions should be out of trading. Emotions spoil strategies nut as a human being, it’s natural to feel upset.

結論

Building your own trading robot is not as easy as ABC. It entails allot of effort in research, trying and testing trading signals and detaching every trade from your emotions. All of these steps are built on the foundation of your trading experience.

Remember that building a trading robot is anchored with the basic steps:
• Gathering and identifying the data you will use. Be very keen on what data to retain and what data will go directly to the bin. Not all data fed by your broker, articles written by analysts or data given to you by someone you know are reliable. Make sure to get the right data, analyze the data and trade using the data.

• A trading platform you are comfortable with. Before you start making your own trading robot, feel free to try different trading platforms. It’s like trying on some new pair of shoes before buying them. Do not go for something very complicated and you cannot even decode some basic functions. Remember that your platform is your playing field. It is more fun to trade through a platform you know how to operate than to get the most technical one and read through the help section while some other traders are gaining fast from a current trend.

• A reliable broker that will assist you on your trades. Your broker is your partner. It gives you data, platform and sometimes analysis in real time. Make sure to choose the broker that can give you what you demand and what you need.

If you will follow some of the above tips, you are on the right track on making your own trading robot.