[darthtrader3.0beta]

There are obviously flaws in the business models of comercial trading software. Namely for the people who post on this site its that you can't stay in business without catering to the newbs who it would be alien to not have MACD or RSI as a base...The popularity of this board though shows there is an untapped market for software that has no concern for that kind of uselessness.
There are alot of smart people here who I assume probly know other smart people who don't post here. I can think of 3 mad "scientists" I'm friends with who don't post here but a software project would get them to.
James has already locked in probly the best marketting name for such software that at least I can imagine..."Traders Laboratory".
I assume some other people here have seen the TickZoom guys open source C# software ideas on elite...the code has been released but seems to have died on the vine. He should have come here instead of elite
It would probly be quite an interesting "experiment" if we invite the TickZoom guy to here to work on "Traders Laboratory"...he is clearly a monster software engineer but doesn't appear to be a monster as far as a project lead.
The project lead should be our collective "swarm intelligence" here.

[Soultrader]

Quite interesting darthtrader. I would be impressed if you can pull this off but want to make sure there is a disclaimer for such products using Traders Labortory as a name since there is no way for me to support it. Nor do I want any problems arising from order related problems that can cause traders to lose money. Its quite a task you are trying to move forward with but let me know if you need any help.

[darthtrader3.0beta]

Originally Posted by Soultrader »

Quite interesting darthtrader. I would be impressed if you can pull this off but want to make sure there is a disclaimer for such products using Traders Labortory as a name since there is no way for me to support it.

No, No, that is missing the "context" of what I am proposing...The "context" of what I'm going for has to do with that I'm completely obsessed with ants. No metaphor, the little black creatures. Everynight I read some of Holldobler and Wilson masterpiece on ants..What you quickly get from this is a feel for how much better "swarm intelligence" is than a single human brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

If you realize it or not, you have built a swarm intelligence trading network here that crushes anything else done previously. In that context to say you can't support such software is obviously wrong. Its like saying that this place would be better if you could reply to every thread, but that is obviously false..the "swarm" here knows far far more than both you or I taken singlely..
To me that right there is the flaw/opportunity with trading software.
Me "pulling this off" in that context makes no sense...you would obviously need to be the Queen Bee though. I'm only interested in being a worker bee.
The Queen bee though doesn't plan anything like a human project manager..it just gets laid all day..
I just think that a decentralized, open source trading software can not be beat because of the inputs, especially if the inputs come from this board.

[Soultrader]

Thanks for the input darthtrader. Youre right about this.... most softwares are limited in different ways due the the lack of resources and support each firm can provide. A free open source version definitely has the potential. I currently do not know enough about open source software laws but will look into this. I am only concerned about protecting TL in case something goes wrong like a trader losing $$$$$ due to software issues and who is the one to blame? I guess this can be overcome by a simple digital agreement for software usage?

[BlowFish]

I know (or 'eknow') a couple of people that have rolled there own. One of the more impressive is (racks brain......) Dcraig over at that other forum. There are various toolboxes and open source bits that can be cobbled together (don't underestimate the cobblng however).

Btw if you are interested in swarms check out BioComps Dakota I almost bought it to play with....really couldn't justify it though.

[Eiger]

I'd really like software that does exactly what i want and can handle some of the calcs needed and not hang up. I am looking at this as a potential foundation or 'shell' from which to build a better mousetrap.

http://www.modulusfe.com/stockchartx/

It's not building from the ground up, but seems to offer a useable framework to build on. My major problem is that I know zip about programming, so I would need a counterpart to help. Any thoughts on this or does anyone have any experience with this software?

[AgeKay]

While this would obviously be great, I see two reasons why this is highly unlikely:

1. There is no incentive for the programmers unless they are getting paid. If they do create something really useful then they would probably just keep it to themselves.

2. Most programmers do not understand trading and most traders do not understand programming. This explains why all the trading platforms out there are so crappy. NinjaTrader is a an example of a trading platform written by programmers who do not understand trading (check out their "advanced" matching algorithm on the simulator, ridiculous). X_Trader is an example of a trading platform designed by a trader (Harris Brumsfield) who does not know what is actually possible with computers (limited charts and very limited in performance analysis). I have not used CQG, but I am sure you will get eye cancer from using it over a long period of time ;-) (their designers must be blind).

I just checked TickZoom. They seem to use the open source ZedGraph component for charting. I have used this for my own software before too since it is extremely flexible and very well designed, but found it to be buggy and having poor performance when scrolling on a lot of data and or using it in real-time. So I am currently rewriting all of my charts in WPF 2D Graphics which are hardware accelerated out of the box since it uses DirectX (the API that games use for their drawing) underneath. You just can't beat the performance unless you writing directly the DirectX or the graphics card. It's really amazing.

StockChartX looks good though. I would definitely use their WPF version though because of the hardware acceleration.

BlowFish, can you please provide a link to "Dcraig over at that other forum". I'd like to check it out. I've googled for it, but didn't find anything.

[darthtrader3.0beta]

Originally Posted by AgeKay »

While this would obviously be great, I see two reasons why this is highly unlikely:

Well I don't disagree with you at all. From thinking about it more, its better to forget the TickZoom guy. From what I've read he seems like a great software engineer, his charting stuff is a secondary to producing a monsterly fast tick backtesting engine. My open source suggestion was just because thats what tickzoom aims to be, but my experience is open source is really only good at mostly producing half finished software and sometimes you get an outlier.

Forgetting opensource, I think a more interesting idea is how feasible would it be to make a traderslab "in house" software? That way there is no delusions of marketting to a losest common demoninator like commercial software but it still has the "feel" of an open source project as far as the "swarm intelligence" here.

The basic guts of that software I would view as
you have a datefeed
that datefeed writes to a database
then you pull a chart from that database

My biggest problem with current software is it seems to be datafeed -> chart -> then maybe think about storing data because most people don't care about storing data. Even though its obviously much faster to pull from a database than to go out across the internet to retrive data.