Need suggestions on developing my own ATS to trade FX

[const451]

Hi guys,

I am a graduate financial engineering student and I am planning to develop my own ATS using C++ on Linux platform for trading in FX market. I want to do it for educational purposes but it will be great if (and I hope so) it turns out to be profitable. I am good at C++/C# programming, I've learned and I am still learning financial theory, but I do not know much about market microstructure and I have no experience in trading.

At the Phase 1, I want to develop a simple system, a framework, that will allow me to start trading using a simple strategy. The system should connect to a broker; do signal analysis for outliers; execute a simple strategy; do order processing. Backtesting I'll be doing manually in R or MATLAB. I do not expect it to be profitable yet.

1. What is a good open source system in C++ that I can adapt/reverse engineer? This is probably the best way to start for me. I know about Marketcetera, but that's in Java and for trading equities only, I think. TradeLink is in C# and it's for equities and FX, so maybe TradeLink.

2. A good broker that offers API for FX trading, API that I can consume from C++. I know about Oanda but they charge $600/month and that's too much. I want to start with ~2K account.

I am looking forward to any suggestions that will help me with this project.

Thank you!

 

[adamscj]

I use the FX trading api from Gain. They offer free demo account and don't charge for api access in production.

I've got an implementation I wrote myself in Java but it's just a webservice so no reason why you couldn't do the same in C#/C++.

Personally I found it quite easy to write the whole trading system (apart from the time taken) bu tI do have experience of doing this as a full time job. Apart from the Gain connectivity, I've implemented an signal generation and execution framework that lets me do things like trailing stops.

 

[Blaiserboy]

I use the FX trading api from Gain. They offer free demo account and don't charge for api access in production.

I've got an implementation I wrote myself in Java but it's just a webservice so no reason why you couldn't do the same in C#/C++.

Personally I found it quite easy to write the whole trading system (apart from the time taken) bu tI do have experience of doing this as a full time job. Apart from the Gain connectivity, I've implemented an signal generation and execution framework that lets me do things like trailing stops.

FXCM may offer something of interest

 

[const451]

Forex.com guys are unscrupulous:

http://www.nfa.futures.org/news/newsRel.asp?ArticleID=3676

I use the FX trading api from Gain. They offer free demo account and don't charge for api access in production.

I've got an implementation I wrote myself in Java but it's just a webservice so no reason why you couldn't do the same in C#/C++.

Personally I found it quite easy to write the whole trading system (apart from the time taken) bu tI do have experience of doing this as a full time job. Apart from the Gain connectivity, I've implemented an signal generation and execution framework that lets me do things like trailing stops.