Automated Trading using Free Open Source Frameworks

Please note that this particular meeting will be mainly of interest to those who have the skills to develop software. Non-technical people may want to skip it.

Len Boyette will demonstrate using TradeLink (http://code.google.com/p/tradelink/) to automate trading (or highly-customized monitoring of markets).

TradeLink is the most widely used free open source trading framework, and is probably the first choice you might want to look at if considering that path.

It includes connectors for many brokers and data vendors (http://code.google.com/p/tradelink/wiki/ProviderFeatureMatrix), including Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade, DTN IQFeed, eSignal, and others.

Also, Don Brady will demonstrate an alternative "no-framework " or "do-it-yourself" approach to building a futures-market-monitoring application in C# to interface directly to a typical broker API. (If anyone else may be willing to demo their own project briefly as well, please bring it along and we will include it too).

Len is one of our members here in Raleigh who has been working intensively with TradeLink, and contributing to the open-source project as well.

Len will be able to answer questions on what would be involved in automating various trade ideas that you might have.

In some applications, you might just want to display data in a different way, for example calculate and display complicated spreads.

In others, you could go all the way to actually entering and exiting trades under program control throughout the day, getting close to the edge of high frequency trading.

TradeLink is written in C#, a .Net language, but there is also a higher level layer that allows you to use it with much less programming skill and experience.

Some of our other members have also experimented with TradeLink or alternative frameworks such as ActiveQuant, and we look forward to their input as well during the meeting. We will have some discussion among us as to the respective architectures of one framework versus another, including architectural merit, easy of use, extensibility, reliability, and so forth. We will also get some inputs from members who have looked at fee-based choices such as AmiBroker, OpenQuant, or MarketCetera. So this meeting should also be a good opportunity for anyone interested in automated trading and market tracking to look at alternatives.

After the meeting, Dave W. is organizing an informal get-together at the almost adjacent Cameron Bar and Grill.