Thank you for the responses.

Metatrader sounds ideal as I can program in C.

Any opinion on Quantopian? something for quick testing.

The OMS offered by Fidessa is probably the most common platform used at broker/dealers. Many buyside firms use it as well. Another great platform is offered by Instinet. They have quality execution algos and analytics. Liquidity Book has a nice offering and I like the people there as well. SpiderRock has an integrated trading platform with additional tools & analytics for thing like risk management. It is a very nice offering. In the fixed income electronic trading space, I like Quantitative Brokers. They have terrific execution algos.

For an integrated platform (broker + platform) Tradestation is a good combo. Have used them for years and the backtesting / automation is very good.

@Akashish

Go for MT5 then.

Some nice features:

* Automatic download of historical data from your broker

* If you need to run more extensive optimization It is cheap and convinient to use the "bot"

network

- Good support and documentation on the MQL5 forum

I run product at Quantopian and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

We offer 13 years of minute-bar price/volume data and 13 years of corporate fundamental data for both research and backtesting, for free. You can also do paper trading (forward trading) on our system.

When you're ready to trade you can hook your algorithm up to your Interactive Brokers account. We support both their paper trading and real money trading accounts.

We support hundreds of real-money traders, who have traded hundreds of millions of dollars of US equities since we launched the real-money integration in January 2014.

On our site, you code your algorithm in Python. Our platform is free. You own your algorithm; it is your intellectual property. If we think your algorithm performs well we will approach you and negotiate with you to include your algorithm in our forthcoming crowd-sourced hedge fund.

I would be remiss if I didn't also point out the monthly contest that we run. If you win, you manage $100,000 of our money, and you keep 100% of the profits. https://www.quantopian.com/open

I personally do not trust any website where strategies are downloaded. Code of strategy - is a very-very private data. Share it - and you loose you idea ;-)

Just to clear up any misunderstanding: the vast majority of algorithms on Quantopian are secret and private. Protecting intellectual property is one of our core commitments to our customers: https://www.quantopian.com/faq#ip

However, if one chooses, one can share an algorithm. Several hundred people have chosen to share their algorithms. Most of the time, that's someone looking for help and advice.

Dan, I'm absolutelly sure that company like QP is not stealling ideas. But for private traders (as I am) good to keep in secret algos on their own laptops. Just for sleeping well.

It is like a government.

* Are you believe in your government?

* Yes.

* Are you share all your secret with your government?

* Absolutelly not!

=)

What products do you trade and on what exchanges/countries? Will you trade across asset classes or a single asset?

You will find most products created in the US to be too feature poor to trade markets where ticks are not 0.01 and lot sizes are set by the exchange. Although the platform may allow one to design and test an idea, the tests (back test, walk forward, etc.) will create bound errors which compound with every trade simulated.

In most non US market cases, the proper environment will require one to build, or have a platform which allows the definition of, a security master and FX history for each market in which one plans to trade vs. a single currency for which one will use in performance reporting.

Is your goal to create a retail based solution used for just you and/or friends and family, or are you planning a strategy targeted at institutional investors?

As you evaluate various platforms, don't forget other specific market related charges such as commission in basis points, settlement charge per allocation of $20-25. One needs to plan on how to define total cost of acquisition and disposal of the asset traded and standardization on a single currency back to total capital for trade allocation.

Metatrader 4|5 used lang. MQL5, difficult import data from others prog.

@Alexander

Do not understand what you are trying to say. There are a number of ways to get data into MQL4/MQL5. Files, DLL, Databases

your platform will depend on what domain you want to work on, different domains(like forex, stocks, derivs etc) have different strategies and requirements. I have been working on "algo-trading" for the last two years on 1. forex+commodities domain., 2. equity domain.

both of the above are different types of beasts when it comes to algorithmic and data requirements.

I tried quite a few in forex and my experience is that MT4/5 is the best for forex/commodities,

Quantopian is good for equity, *but* still new. I have never seen a platform like quantopian and is open to all.

Both have good support for back testing.

MT4/5 can be made to replay tick data with great pains. HST/FSX file generation required, plus a small hack, all explained in http://eareview.net/tick-data/tick-data-backtesting

For not just FX, free tick data can be taken from Dukascopy. Previous link explains how to do it.

MT4/5 however has great limitations, one of them being the inability to record PnL on every tick, it only records PnL on close of trades and computes all statistic, including drawdown on those. Great way to do backtesting of a trading strategy, think it is a winning one and not see the real drawdown it generates, which in leveraged FX may lead to a margin call.

I've just built a historical database with KDB, using Dukascopy data, integrated R with it for research and writing C++ modules for the strategy with connectivity to take it live. Have found the combination quite powerful, able to deal with large amounts of data, including the situation in which it may trade millions of times a day.

@John

I do not think MT4/5 is a platform suitable for HFT. Its good for a lot of things but not that

Totally agree