I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Metatrader. I love the fact that it’s free and that it will run on Linux (using Wine), however that is about the extent of my love for it. My list of dislikes about it are many, to summarise: I think from a technological perspective that their platform is very poorly designed.
There are numerous other automated trading software packages, the majority require payment, which is fine if you’re firstly trading large amounts of money and secondly making good money. For the majority of beginners, this is not the case, so we’re stuck with inferior tools to use during our learning.
One of the pieces of automated trading software you need to pay for is OpenQuant, I’ve known about it for some time and in the past I downloaded a demo version of their software had a quick play with it though gave up after I had some issues with getting external data into the program to use. I’ve just recently installed OpenQuant again to evaluate and really love the platform, coding is a dream (it’s c#) and rather simple yet powerful. There is full portfolio testing which is ideal for what I’m looking for.
My only issue is the data importation is not going very well, I’m trying to import 5 minute bars from CSV and I think it will take a couple of days to complete each currency pair, I have 3 which I want to import. I suspect that this may be partially due to the data being a bit dubious and OpenQuant is doing some kind of data cleaning. I’m getting my data from Metatrader (yup being cheap again) and from what I can see there are some decent sized gaps (I’m talking price gaps). We will see how I go in the next 27 days, I would really like to use OpenQuant to test my strategy before the demo period finishes, though if I can’t get it to import the data in a reasonable amount of time then I might resort to writing my own simulation software.