You know how to solve problems, and you are familiar with coding concepts, then what should you know about developing an algorithmic trading strategy. Yup! It is where you should implement your code. That is the trading platforms that have direct market access with the brokerage agency. This article is all about coding in the trading platforms and all related to trading software and their realm. Shall we start our research on trading platforms and trading software?. Okay, let’s dig in.
First we as going to see what is a trading platform, its used, its functionalities, and ultimately how to automate the trading platform. That is Coding the trading platform.
What is a Trading Platform?
A Trading platform is nothing but a Software tool to execute market positions. It is predominantly used in the day trading market. That opening, closing and managing the stock market positions are done on the business hours of a single day. The trading platform is always associated with the trading brokers. Otherwise, we could say stock market brokers are the only entity that offers a trading platform for the public. They allow the public to trade in their platform to buy and sell stocks, or for free or by maintaining some minimum balance amount in the corresponding account. This trading account could be attached to the savings account for fund transfer purposes.
What is Trading Software and It’s Uses?
Trading Software is a tool that provides various fundamental and technical analyses of market data. It also allows the user to trade and analyze the performance of a stock over some time. The generic features of trading software include technical analysis, paper trading, fundamental analysis, order placement, automated trading, performance analysis, and backtesting.
Features of Trading Software: Each software differs by its features through which we can compare the products. Whereas, the most common and basic features includes
- Fundamental Analysis: The basic research on market and price movements to pick the right stock.
- Technical Analysis: Analysis if stocks and the market behavior on trade-specific technical indicators.
- Placing Trade Orders: Softwares that allow placing market buy or sell order according to the trading strategy. Some allow programmable APIs for direct market access.
- Algorithmic Trading Strategies: This strategy is a unique program that executes trading activity. It is the key part of robotic trading software.
- Pictograms and Charts: Charts to represent market data for easy and quick processing of data.
- Expert Advisors and Stock Quotes: Expert advisory on stock and their market behavior and predicting the price movements.
- Trending Market News Feeds: Latest market news and all the updates on the trending industry.
- Trade Order Execution Tools: Tools to place orders automatically with the technical parameters underlying.
- Scanning and Research Tools: Tools specifically to gauge the market price movements in a trade range.
- Live Support: Advanced technology support facility if the software faces a technical glitch.
The capability of every trading platform can be measured by its capacity in trade activity execution, the ability to access networks and routes, software stability and compatibility, advanced tech support, and other key technical trading indicators it can run to elaborate its features.
Different Trading Platforms: There are two types of trading platform exits in the market. They are a commercial platform and prop platform.
- Commercial Trading: These platforms are the one that allows day trading, with quotations, citations, charts, news feeds and the common featured trading platforms available for the use of the public.
- Prop Platform: It is the proprietary ones which are deployed by the stockbroker firms for internal usage with specific functionalities. It is customized according to the business need of the financial institution.
The prominent foreign exchange trading platforms are MetaTrader, Robinhood, TDAmeritrade, Tradestation, Interactive brokers, Merrill Edge, fidelity investments, E*trade, Charles scarab, ninja trader, and ally invest. The features and fees determine the functionality of trading software.
The best trading software in India is ICICI Trade racer, motile ideal mobile trading, Angel broking, and zerodha kite. These also depend on how much fees they collect and what are all the features they offer for trading at ease.
Automatic Trading Platform
The automatic trading platform is nothing but developing an alpha seeking trading strategy that runs n number of times consistently to manage and generate capital gains. Mostly deployed in high-frequency trade operations for placing orders in numerous trades to accumulate a gamut gain. Coding the trade strategy on the trading platform that has direct market access stockbroker to place order is simply referred as automated trading platform. The most common trading platform is Metatrader written with MetaQuoteLanguage(MQL) scripts.
There is a substantial increase in number of users in these platforms due to the rising awareness of coding in financial markets. The programmers who has sound knowledge on trading concepts are called as Quants. Quants are professional traders and coders who develop an algorithmic trading strategy that could be implemented on real-time trading activity. Quontopian, IBPy, Quant connect are the platforms that are written in Python and C#. So people could easily generate a trading strategy with python libraries and execute on the trading platforms.
Now you would have a clear idea of what is a trading platform and how to execute python codes and MQL scripts which is more like C programming syntax to automate trading. Algorithmic trading is soaring high in this digital arena. If you do get an interest in trading and coding then you have got a wide opportunity in mighty investment banks, hedge fund companies, and trade brokerage firms.
