I've used both Trade-Ideas and Trade Navigator to autotrade at IB. Trade Ideas was great in the sense that it will scan the entire market/watchlist for my setup and when it sees it will execute on however many candidates it finds. It will instantly buy 10 stocks at once if that's what it sees. The issue with Trade Ideas is that none of the indicators are configurable, so it's extremely limited in the system you can create. Trade Navigator is great because you can configure whatever type of technical indicators or trading system you want, not really many boundaries here. The problem is you have to assign your system to one ticker. It won't scan the market for your setup and take multiple positions at once. What I'm looking for is the flexibility of system creation that Trade Navigator gives with the ability to scan the entire market and take multiple setups at once. Any recommendations?
If you can't do what you need to do with the Strategy Wizard, the guys at Wealth-Lab (C#) are very helpful (free support)! U.S. residents can autotrade with a qualified account and $0 commissions at Fidelity, where you get Wealth-Lab for free. Others can trade using Wealth-Lab at IB with an extension available from a third party at ib-automated-trading.com. An added bonus with Wealth-Lab is that you can publish trading signals at WealthSignals.com
Quantacula Studio, C# or drag and drop strategy creation, connection to IB, extendable architecture so can consume different data feeds and potentially connect to other brokers. Stellar backtesting.
It's not an easy task for beginners, but no only that, the IB-API is often very confusing, even for Pros. I don't understand why so complicated when you have just to wrap data coming from the pipe. I'm still building very slowly mine. Are you Pro? Did you finish with something stable? What language did you choose? ( please no python ) I'm used to C and C# as a beginner, but I hear very often many complains about IB-API in C# flavor. I appreciate any suggestion from your experience.
No, I'm an amateur retail investor. Yes, I'm running my own software 24/5 since 5+ years. Java, as that was the only one of the available API versions I more or less understood when I started developing my own software.
Interfacing with the API is quite small part of developing a full fledged trading platform. In my experience a lot of time goes into developing frameworks for backtesting, parameter optimization, strategy development, portfolio generation, etc. which is API agnostic. I'm using C++ because I have extensive C++ software development background, but I don't think it really matters which language you use since the actual live trading isn't performance intensive. For parameter optimization using a high performance language helps though, where C++ can be quite useful.