amibroker- newbie

Hello!

I will get Amibroker 4.6 and I am wondering if i can buy and sell shares directly from within the program and set stoplosses and such, or do i have to use Amibroker, just to analyse the stocks and then go online to the website of a broker and do the buying and selling there on the www.

Can I also use this program to automatically screen all the shares for ones that i think are good buys/sells based on my indicators?

Hope someone can help me with these questions. Thanks!

For your first question, the standard retail version of AmiBroker (which is now 4.70) does not support trading directly from within the program. However, a beta version is available which has a trading interface to Interactive Brokers. To find out more about this, join this Yahoo group:

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/AmiBroker-at/

I haven't really kept up with developments in this area and haven't tried this myself, but I believe you would need to be very proficient with AmiBroker's AFL programming language to get this to work. Also I think that the author has plans to introduce some kind of trading interface in a future version, so why not just e-mail him, in my experience he is very willing to help.

For your second question the answer is most definitely yes - the program is very good at that, but again you will need to learn the programming language. Although, there is a third-party tool called PowerScan which provides a graphical user interface to the programming language:

http://www.amitools.com/

You may find however that you might not be able to get this tool to describe your particular system and so would end up having to learn the language anyway.

Good luck

KenN

Later...gosh I'm behind the times! A 'low level' automatic trading interface for Interactive Brokers *is* now supported with AmiBroker, you just have to download an additional free tool. But currently it is not recommended you use a real account, only the demo account IB can provide. Have a look here:

http://www.amibroker.com/at/

You really would have to know AFL though to get this thing to work in its current state, but clearly things are moving along...

KenN

Thank you very much for your insights!