Seriously, the next step should be learning to code.
The coding is the simple part, a chimpanzee could do it. Actually I dont believe its possible to design an automated strategy without being able to code. 10 years ago I used to believe it was as simple as finding someone who knew how to trade, define a set of rules and automate. It isnt, its a completely different game.
One of the big problems is that most of the people who offer programming services are pretty clueless about automated trading. If they knew what they where doing they'd be doing it rather than working for chump change. The only solution is to do it yourself. At a later stage you can bring in specialist help if required.
The only other advice I can give is dont start by learning a trading platform language such as MQL, start off with something simple until you understand the basic building blocks and concepts like variable scope, loops, conditional statements, functions etc. when you are comfortable you can add in the complexities of dealing with a real time data feed.
The reason I say that is that testing an application in real time that is responding to events based on an unknown real time data feed is a lot more complex than you might typically experiece in other types of development projects where you can engineer test cases and get instant feedback. For example, you might want to test that your ma cross to open a buy trade is working, but then the feckin market goes short ! and so the conditions you wanted to test didnt occur, and might not occur again for quite sometime, and when they do, perhaps you discover a bug, and the whole feckin process starts again. It is possible to generate test conditions and use the backteter, but its not something you should be doing unless you are comfortable with the programming language.
