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Ask HN: UI Design for Financial Trading

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Re: Ask HN: UI Design for Financial Trading

#11

Post by strongvigilance »

clausok wrote: post #10

As someone who used xtrader a lot in the past, I'm a little sad to see it get claimed by the web-based movement. That was some really fine software. To get a sense of the tradeoffs taking place that leave you with a noticeably slower UI, see here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2019/02/12/openfi... PSA: It may be a good idea to hire a programmer and customize your software. TT has a nice API. If you have…

Interesting - I have looked into the API, though TT tech support believe they can fix the issues I'm seeing. Any reason for choosing F#/WPF over C#/Winforms?

And agree 100% on Xtrader - very strange business decision to discontinue a 15 year old piece of software than thousands of users are willing to pay $1200 per month for!

Re: Ask HN: UI Design for Financial Trading

#12

Post by clausok »

strongvigilance wrote: post #11
clausok wrote: post #10

As someone who used xtrader a lot in the past, I'm a little sad to see it get claimed by the web-based movement. That was some really fine software. To get a sense of the tradeoffs taking place that leave you with a noticeably slower UI, see here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2019/02/12/openfi... PSA: It may be a good idea to hire a programmer and customize your software. TT has a nice API. If you have…

Interesting - I have looked into the API, though TT tech support believe they can fix the issues I'm seeing. Any reason for choosing F#/WPF over C#/Winforms? And agree 100% on Xtrader - very strange business decision to discontinue a 15 year old piece of software than thousands of users are willing to pay $1200 per month for!

re WPF vs winforms: consensus recommendation would be WPF. But for something you're building for yourself, WPF has a lot of complexity that you may not get much benefit from. If you decide on WPF, don't use xaml! Separating dynamic UI into a static markup language is a complexity disaster that will cost you a lot of time. (Note that google results are dominated by xaml answers, so if you want code-only answers it's best to search github.)

Best approach may be a third option, at least as a prototype. Use Excel, with a RTD server that connects to TT. Uninstall the Bloomberg Excel Tools add-in and use direct calls into BBG's own RTD server, i.e., =RTD("BLOOMBERG.RTD","","VGA INDEX", "LAST_PRICE") instead of BDP(...) for market data (~100x faster), and you can get to an 80% solution very quickly.

re F# vs C#, I had used C# for a decade before switching (after I had a vacation ruined because of a multi-threading bug in our position-sizing model. Multi-core parallelism is much easier in F# due to default immutability). If you play around with the F# REPL you'll pretty quickly find out whether the language fits your mind well or not. For me, as soon as I read this code (http://fssnip.net/5I), I knew I had found my native language.

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