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I went back to my college for some recruiting recently and learned a bunch of our alumni (but I don't know them in person) is launching a new platform called Rizm (https://equametrics.com/), aimed at automated trading:
- Co-location/proximity hosting for your algorithm provided together with the platform (sounds like TT's AutoSpreader)
- "Visual, drag-and-drop programming" (seems like you construct flow charts instead of writing code)
- Browser-based support
- Mobile device support
- Tick-level backtesting
The price looks pretty competitive. I'm not sure if they offer futures, as it seems to be aimed at equities; although IB is supported. I'm dubious about the kind of proximity hosting they can offer with the brokers that they are supporting, we will see.
Edit: Might be better to change the topic of this thread to something less ambiguous, moderators please. Thanks!
Good find, and I like the idea of cloud based backtesting and execution. TT started doing this with their Algo Design Lab.
But the price point of this product defies reason, I don't see how they can be profitable or sustainable at this price and offer a competitive product. It seems aimed at retail traders, kind of like Mirror Trader or the like, instead of sophisticated quants and algo traders.
This seems to indicate it was a Kickstarter project, but I can't find the project details anywhere on Kickstarter.
It really seems to be focused on "newbie" retail traders, inexperienced programmers. This turns me off because a product aimed at this type of trader is usually not advanced enough to satisfy the serious traders thirst. It is very hard for a platform to be good at both ends of the game.
The product has a lot of good ideas, and like I mentioned, the cloud-centric approach is a good one in my opinion. Hopefully someone can offer some first hand opinions.
One important point is to keep your strategies confidential. If you can't protect your intellectual property (for instance with obfuscated code or using crypted dlls) you have to trust the vendor. "Cloud-based" and "new product" and the source of origin let my alarm bells ring. Trusting can be tough game these times.
Looks like an interesting project that has a nice interface, but I see several problems here.
1. The most important one is that very few retail traders can actually develop winning trading strategies that backtest and execute well.
2. The small group of professional system traders that can actually get it right are unlikely to do so using limited visual tools (no matter how robust). You need to think "out of the box" in order to beat the market.
3. Most companies that we deal with like to keep their strategies a secret. If you have a winning strategy that generates an impressive equity curve, would you risk having it stored on servers that you don't control ? The company storing it is worth less than your strategy, if the strategy scales well.
They do have a nice looking website! It will be interesting to see if they have a market for this product.
If you have any questions about IQBroker's products or services, please send me a Private Message.
I think everybody who has made serious development with a succesfull outcome, has this issue in mind. I can't share every detail, but i want to mention some basic stuff for a beginning algo trader who wants to secure the execution environment (in no particular order).
1. Don't use C# at all (the save way when using advanced VM based obfuscation, slows down the code too much)
2. Use your own proprietary program runtime to access feeds and/or trading infrastructure servers directly (via FIX interface, R|API and so on)
3. Use C/C++ with subsequent hardening via commercial product to obfuscate and encrypt the code (keep speed issues in mind)
4. Know your enemy and learn how the attackers work (become a lttle hacker)
5. Do a strong secured connection to your own (local based) server at startup/periodically and transmit hardware/account related values to identify misuse and instance spanning.
6. Don't use a VM-based execution environment. It's much easier to copy the whole plattform and/or to debug it
7. Use a big well known provider to colocate your server
8. Do some Debugger/Intrusion detection and alarm silently and stop, slow down or change your executions. Be aware that you don't suck your own account due to wrong programming!
Koepisch, I think you're right on some issues but taking others too far.
C# is compiled and optimized to the server architecture that it is running on and in most cases just as fast and sometimes even faster than C++ code.
Note that execution speed is mostly determined by the code that you write. Give 10 developer a coding project and you'll likely to get 10 different execution times regardless of the language they are using. C++ code is much more likely to have coding errors (due to it being more complex).. see Knight Capital Group 400M loss..
The obfuscation we used does not slow down the code - it's been tested.
I agree that your execution platform and algorithm should be on a very secure machine that only you have access to. No matter how large the hosting company is. If your algorithm is making a lot of money it's worth a lot of money and should be in a very secure environment.
If you have any questions about IQBroker's products or services, please send me a Private Message.
One of the very appealing parts of TT's Algo Design Lab is the server-side execution, right on the gateway server at the FCM.
They also use a visual way to build blocks of code, and in my experience it worked pretty well. But you really need the ability to get in and write your own code, and not be limited to just the visual wizard.
It is not clear (to me at least) that this new 'Rizm' product has that ability, it seems limited to the visual blocks only?