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I'd like to test, and hopefully trade, a system that scans a portfolio of hundreds of symbols for certain setup and entry conditions before placing a trade. This wouldn't be practical for tick charts, but it might work on minute or daily charts.
I'm currently using MultiCharts, and it has a decent portfolio backtester, in which you can simulate testing of a large portfolio. However, it doesn't allow for actual portfolio-level trading in real-time -- it requires you to have a separate chart for each symbol being traded, which doesn't work well when you want to trade hundreds of symbols. This somewhat defeats the purpose of the portfolio backtester. This feature is supposedly on a to-do list for some point in the future.
In the meantime, are there any good platforms that allow for trading a large number of symbols? It sounds like this can be done using TradeStation, using a macro feature. This wouldn't be bad, since I could re-use my MultiCharts scripts. However, it would lock me into using TradeStation as my broker (rather than IB).
Are there any other trading platforms (e.g., SierraCharts or NinjaTrader) that allow for scanning a large portfolio of symbols, and then executing trades in real-time based on certain entry conditions? Thanks in advance.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
With NinjaTrader you can scan and place orders on multiple instruments (without charts), but it will require some complex C# (NinjaScript) code and you'll likely spend a couple of years learning all the "tricks" required to make things work in Ninja.
It is probably better to create a signal generating script by other means, and then just code an interface to read/intercept the signals and place the orders.
To be honest, I doubt many on this board (myself included) has the means (and knowledge) necessary to do "true" portfolio trading.
But if you do, check out Portware, FlexTrade or Tethys. The new Bloomberg Tradebook Portfolio Algorithm is supposedly good. RTS offer good products...
Expect to pay for it, though...
If you're content with EOD, TradersStudio (uses EasyLanguage), Trading Blox, Mechanica and PowerST are good choices.
In short, there are a lot of companies capable of doing portfolio trading, but most are geared towards professional traders and are priced as such too...
A cheap alternative is to get familiar with Excel... Depending on your trade frequency and the level of sophistication of your system, of course...
