Automated Trading resources

One of the things that I’ve been doing sporadically over the last couple of years is dabbling in Automated Trading. Now when I say dabbling, I mean small fry. Mostly playing with backtesting and the occasional test with small amounts of real money.

It’s been interesting, and I’ve learned a lot (many of the ‘things not to do’).

The following is a collection of useful tools and learning resources. Perhaps, the most useful tool that I’ve found has been TradingView. While I’m not particularly interested in the community aspects of the site, the sheer number of different charts you can create, and the ability to add indicators to those charts is a source of insight and learning.

TradeWave is another useful tool. The site is focussed around trading cryptocoin, regardless of whether this is your thing it gives a simple place to test automated trading strategies.

It is quite likely that you’ll need more than this in short order, however it provides a good starting place.

On the more traditional algorithmic trading front is QuantStart. It’s a great set of articles (and books) covering a wide variety of subject around quantitive finance, and algorithmic trading. It includes quite a bit of code in python.

The book Successful Algorithmic Trading, while a good read, rehashes a lot of what you can find on the blog. I’m still supportive of it since as a body of work the blog and book are a fantastic resource.

Finally, iqfeed.net I recommend with some hesitation. While it is widely regarded as one of the best sources of historic and current data, there are a bunch of problems that prevent the whole hearted recommendation

In order to access the API data you have to pay an additional fee, which means that if you want to do anything more than hook it up to an existing app, you can’t (especially during the trial).

Additionally the historical data is not adjusted, which makes it hard to use effectively in backtesting (iqfeed.net doesn’t provide the necessary information to adjust the data yourself either).

That’s about it for me for now. If you have a favourite tool/resource I’d love to hear about it.