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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Trading driven from a spreadsheet brings back horrible memories of my earliest days on Wall Street. Excel was usually hacked in the most grotesque ways: tick data coming in, updating cells and signals and driving actual orders out the other end. Add to the fact that you're running on a desktop computer thats already struggling with a dozen other applications consuming market data, CPU cycles and driving 6 monitors...

I was usually called in to debug these things. My approach was always super minimalist... How do I make the 1 change that will get this all back on its feet again? .... without looking at any of the VBA or the weird DLLs lurking in the shadows.

Having said all that - Google Sheets is actually a different beast. I still wouldn't trade through it. Also, I've been eyeing Alpaca for a while - I like what they're doing. Best of luck to them....

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When I was a trader at Merrill Lynch (NYC, 2005) I traded these basket securities on a Swiss exchange through a Rube-Goldberg-like trading system employing two Excel spreadsheets. Here's how it worked:

A spreadsheet on my computer would pull data from Bloomberg using their Excel API and would price the securities. Those prices would be pulled off the spreadsheet by some Reuters application that would then send those numbers through a 56K modem to Reuter's system. Somebody I never met in London would screen scrape the prices from Reuters into Excel. From that Excel spreadsheet the prices would be posted on the Swiss exchange. I was responsible for any resulting trades and they would go into my book.

These were two sided prices (bid-ask) so if the process broke and the market moved I would get picked off. Thankfully they were mostly all delta 1 instruments with 50 bps of spread so that didn't happen too often.

Edit: before I read the article I wasn't sure if you meant:

https://www.alpaca.ai

https://alpaca.markets

Alpaca.markets is great! What are other alternative for personal solution?

Have you looked at Interactive Brokers? They seem to support more complex order types than Alpaca, which can meaningfully impact returns of a automated trading strategy.

IB is good if you don’t need them. I’ve asked questions via their website and called them to no avail. That being said they seem solid.

Quantopian ? https://www.quantopian.com/

https://alpaca.markets/

And people trusted real money to such a crap solution?

In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

A crappy solution was still the best they had at the time. You're going to hate to read what they say about today's solutions in 2028.

In a kind-of defense of such methods: such technologies do seem crappy when you look at them today, but building good products with bad tools is pretty much in the job description for engineers and even more for experimental scientists. Check a good experimental scientist record of 100-300 years ago and you will be amazed what they did with the tools of the time.

This is not an apples to apples comparison to the spider fight world of trading, but there would still be a lot of ingenuity there. And a simple way to limit risk is to ruthlessly review the results, both automatically and manually. Keep going while it works as expected and stop/adjust if there is a major glitch.

As opposed to another crap solution some small band of programmers could come up with?

If it works...

Like the old joke, you just have to outrun the bear. It just had to be better and get to market quicker than the competition. It could probably beat the guys doing it with desktop calculators quite handily. Also, this is the financial services industry: nobody cares how much coke you're snorting if your profits are good.

You'd be surprised at how much this is still the case.

I remember a while ago there was an article posted here on HN that explained most ATMs are just FTPing txt files back and forth. The amount of fragile, weird systems that underpin our financial world seems deeper every day...

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