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Advice for going live with automated trading in SC?
I plan on making the leap from simulation to real automated trading soon with SC. I was wondering if anyone had some input on the dangers to watch for and methods for making things as safe and redundant as possible.
I am planning on not being there to monitor my trading computer during trading hours due to my job schedule. I do plan on remoting in on a regular basis to verify things are working though.
What precautions should one take in this scenario?
What do you do about power or internet failures?
What are some dangers and fail-safes associated with Sierra Chart?
Any particular brokers or data providers that would be a good choice for automated trading?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
One thing you might consider (if you haven't yet) is running SC on a cloud-based VPS running Windows (server 2008 or 2012)...instead of a PC on your home network. Especially if you are planning on not being around. Generally the VPS would have overwhelming advantages of power and internet reliability, short of investing in a lot of extra hardware in your home.
I'm guessing latency to the broker may not be a big factor for you, but if it was, a VPS would be great for that too.
I hadn't really considered that to be honest. I like the idea in theory, but I wonder if it really is more reliable in practice. I work for a company that offers these services and have seen a lot of outages that cost customers and us a lot of money. You might have the hardware set up for redundancy, but human errors still take things down all the time. I guess I need to do the research and see what's available. Thanks for the suggestion!
One more thing, @sam028 is an administrator of FIO, and he runs a private hosting company specially geared towards reliable VPS's for traders, and also dedicated servers. It's very highly reccommended. You could check it out in this thread
I wanted to provide a quick post regarding some great service. So to prequalify my position, I have no financial interest in the following business nor do I benefit from this posting in any way, only wanted to share with others …
If I may, without advertising for my own services, the problem with AWS and other generic cloud providers is that:
- you never know what would be your bill at the end of the month as you'll pay for many things (RAM and CPU but also disk I/O, storage, ...)
- their network latency to the market gateways are higher, due to the location of their datacenters and the additional network layers involved by their network architectures.
These solutions are working well for "not too real time" activities, where a 1 second response time is not noticeable.
That sounds like a great service you are offering. I don't think it would be necessary for me because I don't trade on time frames short enough to require that kind of speed. If I ever get into some more "scalpy" systems I will certainly keep you in mind.
My main purpose for cloud hosting would be power and internet reliability. However, I think it would probably come with the compromise of reduced computing power, which I am not too keen on. I'll most likely be running many instances of Sierra Chart on multiple cores at once and I'd prefer fast CPU clock speeds.
The power/internet planning is pretty straightforward. I am actually more concerned with making my coding logic as robust as possible to avoid losses when the market is going bonkers or I get some bad data. SC is pretty good in their documentation with regard to this, but it's always good to get advice from those who have made the voyage ahead of you.
Automated trading is subject to all the pitfalls mentioned above. In general if your automated system places a stop and limit (held by the broker - not by your computer) the risk of entering a trade without an exit is eliminated.
The platform I use is know to be glitchy. The platform crashes and I have to reboot to restart it. I have zero confidence in automating with my current platform. I could also use suggestions for more reliable automation.
Please keep seeking advice. Best wishes in your automation!
Researching Automation and VPS I came across your post. I am about to go live on an automated trading strategy my self, and I was wondering if you have any tips from your experience since it is very recent.
Did your Strategy work as it did in simulation?
Did you have any of your fears come true as far as power outages and internet. Here in Florida we have a lot of storms and power outages are expected. So a UPS is always handy.
How did your code perform in real time....any surprises from what was theoretically expected?
Do you by any chance advise on the VPS after your experience?
I'm not familiar with SC, Are they your Broker, do you send your orders to another Broker?
Did you have any issues with SC during automation and How good were they handling it?
