What's it all about, Alfie?

A friend of mine has asked me to look into the Interactive Brokers offerings as they have an API for trading and he's interested in moving off the Windows platform he's on now (.NET) and have me help him scale up his trading strategy quite a bit. So I started looking at what they have.

First off, they are cross-platform, as well as web-based. That's nice. Their API access has virtually everything you need to get market data as well as execute and monitor trades, as well as do all the portfolio management and reporting. Very nicely done. It's also all on GitHub, and they are willing to look at pull-requests on the API. This is really nice for a lot of reasons, but the most significant to me today is that they don't see this as a complete control situation. This tells me a lot.

Honestly, I was getting kinda jazzed about it because I remember all this stuff from Finance. I can see making a process that runs alongside the Trader Workbench - their flagship product and register for ticks and trades and then calculate everything it needs and submit trades as needed. These could all be viewed in the TWS screen as the account would have to be the same. It's like having an automated trader working for you and all you have to do is watch it work.

I read a book on their Java API, and dug into the API Docs as well as reading on the relationship between the IB API and TWS. It's not a bad system. Given that this is not a high-frequency strategy, there's no need for co-location, and the associated costs. It's something that hopefully can run on a MacBook Pro - or if not, then a Mac Pro, and a nice, fast cable modem.

I looked it up, and Comcast can go to 105 Mbps in my area, and I'm at 50 Mbps already. The package for 105 Mbps is pretty decent and about a wash with what I'm paying now for 50 Mbps. I'd have to call and verify and make sure the cost delta is what the web site says, but if so, then it's very doable.

It might be really nice to be back in finance. Start-up again. Holy Cow! What an idea. 🙂

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2015 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Coding, Everything Else, Vendors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.