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Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

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Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#61

Post by oarsinsync »

zelly wrote: post #56
srazzaque wrote: post #45

(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…

The proprietary API is guaranteed to be slower. The brokers must send order flow as FIX to the exchange. This adds latency of however long it takes the broker's software to translate to FIX. I don't think there are any successful quant strategies that don't rely on speed, so basically anything with a proprietary API is solely for amateurs.

> I don't think there are any successful quant strategies that don't rely on speed

There are plenty of successful quantitative algorithms that are in use by non HFT firms

> so basically anything with a proprietary API

If you’re not a direct market participant, colocated in the exchange, you’re not in a position to be talking about speed at all. Also most exchanges optimising for speed are not using FIX.

> is solely for amateurs

You’re not necessarily an amateur, you’re just leaving money on the table for someone else as you’ve not optimised that area of your trading infra yet.

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#62

Post by teruakohatu »

gunn wrote: post #51
teruakohatu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have subscribed to your channel. Do you know of any services that allow non US residents to join? I am in New Zealand.

There's https://hellostake.com/ for NZ and AU. They don't have an API yet but would like to in the future - see comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceNZ/comments/fnbmlx/x... As mentioned, Sharesies plan to allow US market access: https://app.sharesies.nz/us-equities-register They do seem to have a private API at least: https://app.sharesies.nz/api/fund/list https://www.revolut.com/en-NZ have plans to…

Thank you

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#63

Post by toohotatopic »

ciarannolan wrote: post #47
lawrenceyan wrote: post #37

Ok, but what's going to be your business model if you don't charge commission?

Who is this question directed at? OP is linking free software. If you mean brokerages that advertise no fees to trade, they make money by loaning the cash in customers' accounts. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/brokers-p...

And by loaning out shares to short sellers [1]

Which to me begs the question: do you actually own the shares when you buy them with those brokers? What happens if supply is limited and the loaned shares actually have to be sold?

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsalebenefit...

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#64

Post by thidr0 »

srazzaque wrote: post #50
Random_ernest wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not the question you had in mind, but what Lisp and what made you choose it?

Common Lisp on SBCL. I lived on the JVM for quite some time (and still do), and I wanted to explore other ecosystems out of sheer curiosity. Got to playing with Lisp/SBCL, some initial tests showed it was pretty quick, and was impressed that I could disassemble functions in the REPL and iterate rapidly. Then a while later... I noticed there wasn't a FIX library at around the same time I was exploring creating my own…

Do you recommend that book and/or any others? Interested in automated trading + functional languages

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#65

Post by pedalpete »

srazzaque wrote: post #55
klohto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you’re not from US, what trading platforms do you use? I haven’t found any with free commissions and public APIs in the EU. Well, except for Interactive Brokers.

I'm in Australia, so the choices here are also a bit limited. Also, I'm less interested in equities. In the CFD space, my shortlisting technique now is basically "do you offer cTrader", because as mentioned above, this means they have a FIX endpoint. Broker offerings here seem a few "paradigm shifts" behind the US. Zero commissions are unheard of last I checked. Also, if you approach some brokers here and ask for an…

Is IB "Interative Brokers"? I'm trying to figure out if Aus is Australia or Austria. I'm in Australia, and have been looking at who to go with. Almost signed up with CBA last week, but definitely more expensive to what I'm used to in North America.

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#66

Post by srazzaque »

nurettin wrote: post #60
srazzaque wrote: post #45

(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…

FIX is just a protocol template. Vendors will make non-standard extensions to it. For example: OCO you send to CQG won't work with StoneX.

Of course, and in practice you basically always need to tweak your FIX layer when connecting to multiple brokers.

Whilst there will be differences, you can rely on a surprising amount being uniform. The general session/authentication flow and serialisation mechanisms will be largely the same. Or the use of standard fields ClOrdID, or OrderQty. Or the "general" meaning of the messages NewOrderSingle or ExecutionReport.

It's somewhat predictable where the differences are going to be: identifying securities (different codes, etc), expressing order types and algo parameters, and subtle differences to order lifecycles.

Again this is a gut feel, but I doubt that if you take 2 proprietary APIs, you'll get that level of uniformity.

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#68

Post by srazzaque »

pedalpete wrote: post #65
srazzaque wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Australia, so the choices here are also a bit limited. Also, I'm less interested in equities. In the CFD space, my shortlisting technique now is basically "do you offer cTrader", because as mentioned above, this means they have a FIX endpoint. Broker offerings here seem a few "paradigm shifts" behind the US. Zero commissions are unheard of last I checked. Also, if you approach some brokers here and ask for an…

Is IB "Interative Brokers"? I'm trying to figure out if Aus is Australia or Austria. I'm in Australia, and have been looking at who to go with. Almost signed up with CBA last week, but definitely more expensive to what I'm used to in North America.

Yep, IB is Interactive Brokers. And I hear you about the brokerage rates here!

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#69

Post by ciarannolan »

toohotatopic wrote: post #63
ciarannolan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is this question directed at? OP is linking free software. If you mean brokerages that advertise no fees to trade, they make money by loaning the cash in customers' accounts. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/brokers-p...

And by loaning out shares to short sellers [1] Which to me begs the question: do you actually own the shares when you buy them with those brokers? What happens if supply is limited and the loaned shares actually have to be sold? [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsalebenefit...

Investopedia is such a great resource. Their pages are always well written and seem well researched.

And I'm also interested in the answers to your questions :)

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#70

Post by nurettin »

srazzaque wrote: post #66
nurettin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FIX is just a protocol template. Vendors will make non-standard extensions to it. For example: OCO you send to CQG won't work with StoneX.

Of course, and in practice you basically always need to tweak your FIX layer when connecting to multiple brokers. Whilst there will be differences, you can rely on a surprising amount being uniform. The general session/authentication flow and serialisation mechanisms will be largely the same. Or the use of standard fields ClOrdID, or OrderQty. Or the "general" meaning of the messages NewOrderSingle or ExecutionReport…

Execution report is another thing that is different between the two. You can't even list your running orders without resorting to custom tags. You can't send multiple orders without providing their custom delimiters. You have to modify login messages and insert custom tags before a message is sent. The only uniformity I am left with is the fix template of key=value\0x01 repeating N times. Nobody conforms to fix 4.2 or 5.0xxx they say they derive from it, then you go through their conformance test of 100 messages and see for yourself what changes they made.
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