Hello, I have been dabbling in trading for about a year, but have not had a lot of success. I recently passed Level 1 of the CMT course. I have become interested in algorithmic trading, and downloaded Prodigio and have started playing around with it. However, the learning curve seems steep, and I am wondering if there is a better tool for what I want to do. At this point, I would like to be able to backtest fairly simple algorithms, such as SMA cross-overs, RSI, etc. I do not wish to re-create the wheel. Does anyone have any advice? Thanks.

Ninjatrader has a full set of strategies and backtesting tools. And the charting probably looks better than Prodigio. I just saw Prodigio when it was on ThinkOrSwim and wasn't impressed by its klunkiness. (Shortly before TDAmeritrade took over TOS, it seemed all the resources were spent on Prodigio instead of improving and fixing the TOS platform which was annoying to TOS customers. Now TDA has prioritized TOS and has continued to upgrade it very nicely.) Plus TOS has been upgraded with it's own automation tools and backtesting. ex: "thinkback" which is great for showing p/l history for option spreads.