JAM has extensive experience of taking trading systems through their full life-cycle; from ideas, to coding, to analysis, to forward testing, to live trading.

If you wish to discuss your trading systems then please Contact Me.

Trading Systems Development

• Development of strategies based on standard indicators, through price based filters, through to strategies based on ‘discretionary’ buying and selling methods.
• Development of strategies that work on single symbols through to strategies that use multiple symbols and timeframes.
• Using the JAM Higher Timeframe Pack you can work around the limitations using TradeStation with native multiple timeframes. i.e. using multiple datastreams on a chart means your Strategy can only trade end of bar.  Using the JAM Higher Timeframe pack you get the addition of multiple timeframes and are still able to trade tick-by-tick.
• Working with third-parties to integrate their products into TradeStation.  JAM has worked with experts in Machines Learning and Artificial Intelligence to send their signals direct to a Strategy.
• Bring additional trading data or trading signals into TradeStation by reading text files, global variables or external databases.  Send data out of TradeStation for further analysis.
• Reading data from other trading platforms to provide signals in TradeStation (see JAM TGVs).
• Working with multiple charts, feeding multiple data into a single ‘master’ trading chart.
• Tuning the speed at which Strategies run to speed up your optimizations.  Even small increases in speed can make a huge difference to your time when the Strategy is optimized thousands of times.

Strategies vs. Auto-Traders

A Strategy (with a capital ‘S’) is the standard way of doing automated trading in TradeStation.  It provides a simple way of sending trade signals to TradeStation’s servers, and onto the Exchanges.  However, in live trading Strategies have many limitations and some traders find they need to take their systems to the next level.  This is where Auto-Traders come in.

• • Strategy
    • Can be used for historical backtesting and optimization
    • Relatively simple to code, and hence relatively inexpensive
    • Low tolerance to failures in live trading e.g. rejected orders or Internet outages will cause the Strategy to fail
    • Unable to correctly handle some order types in live trading e.g. limit orders
    • Combined order types (OCOs, OSOs) are simulated.  Advanced order types (MOC, MOO etc) are not available
    • A single Strategy can only trade one symbol at a time, and in a single account
    • Can only run on a Chart
    • Signals can be redirected to third-party brokers
    • Coded in ‘old’ EasyLanguage
  • Auto-Trader
    • Live trading only.  No historical backtesting
    • Complex and expensive compared to Strategies
    • High tolerance to failures.  Can be programmed to recover from most situations (even from bugs in TradeStation itself!)
    • Uses native orders types such as OSO, OCO, MOO, MOC etc
    • A single Auto-Trader can trade multiple symbols, in multiple trading accounts.  Can do pairs trading.  Can do trade and order mirroring between accounts
    • Can run in RadarScreen and TradingApps, as well as on Charts
    • Can combine manual/discretionary trading with automated trading
    • Can only be used with the TradeStation brokerage (though see JAM TGVs)
    • Coded in OOEL

If you’re starting with a new trading idea then you will want to use a Strategy because it is quick to develop and can be used for backtesting. When you first go live it will be with a Strategy to make sure your ideas translate from testing to live trading. When trading live you may find that the Strategy is not reliable enough for you, or that it isn’t correctly taking the trades that are being signaled, or that you generally don’t trust it to do automated trading. In this case you will want to consider an Auto-Trader.

Combining Discretionary and Auto Trading

• Automated and discretionary trading can be combined in many ways.  For instance you might have an automated system to enter a trade and set a stop, but then you might want to manually alter that stop as the trade develops.  Or you might want to enter manually, but have the exits automated.
• There are many ways of achieving this, from using manual trendlines to tell TradeStation where to place a fixed stop, to more advanced systems such as JAM’s Advanced Auto-Trader tools.

If you wish to discuss your trading systems then please Contact Me.