ATS Development Starts!

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I had a great meeting last night with my ATS team! We’re all on board and we’re all roaring to go! The next step is for me to write down my trading strategy into something called “pseudocode.” Essentially is a simple outline of statements that the developers will use to code the ATS. This will require some thinking on my part because a lot my trading strategy is in my head and transforming those “organic thoughts” into hard code will be challenging for me.

We do have some housekeeping things to take care of like signing a Nondisclosure Agreement in case the team falls apart. Although I doubt that will happen, you still have to be business smart and protect your hard work (not just mine but the teams).

Despite that, I’m very excited that the ATS is moving into production. The team is really motivated since they have no understanding of how the markets work and they want to learn how to better make money in the markets; geed is an wonderful motivator!

  • http://123.456.9856 Sarah Parker

    Hi Tom,
    Congratulations on the ATS’s progress. If you don’t mind sharing more
    details, I would like to know more about your ATS development.

    How much time do you think it will take your team, will they start from an open
    source ATS, what programming language will they be using, are you worried about
    trading latency, what is the source of data, and finally what is the estimated
    cost.

    You can choose to ignore the questions you do not want to answer at your will.

    Thanks,
    ~Sarah

  • http://www.neuralmarkettrends.com Tom

    Sarah: We’re all full-time employees at other corporations so this development will take place over nights and weekends. I hope to have a proof of concept up and running by September if possible but we’ll see.

    The developers are C#/ Dot net developers so I suspect we’ll be using that. For testing purposes we’ll use opentick.com data.

  • Shane

    Hi Tom,

    I’ve been away for a while, so I just noticed your posts about ATS. There is a great open source ATS platform out there called JSystemTrader.

    http://code.google.com/p/jsystemtrader/

    The features include:

    * real time trading via the Interactive Brokers API
    * strategy backtesting
    * strategy optimization
    * historical data retrieval from IB and OpenTick

    It is coded in Java,works w/ an Interactive Brokers account and is very reliable. All you have to do is take a sample strategy (written in Java) and modify it to trade the way you want. You can backtest with historical data, forward test with real time data or trade live automatically.

    This way you focus on your strategy and not building a trading platform (which could take a very long time and lot’s of money).

  • Tom

    Shane! You are the awesomest! Thanks so much for that link!!! You’re not going to be believe how much time and money you are going to save me!

  • Shane

    No problem. Let me know if you need any help.

  • Tom

    Shane, I’ll let you know. I have a call into my development team to see if they can do JAVA.

  • Shane

    Depending upon the complexity of your trading algorithm, I might be open to the idea of collaborating on this (which would save you money). I may also be able to provide additional value that you might not get from a hired developer.

  • Tom

    Shane: I’ll get back to you on that. I have a call into my development team to see if they can use the java based ATS.