Comparing Commercial Platforms for Backtesting and Automated Trading
Summary
The document surveys commercial suites that combine market data, backtesting, event processing, and automated trading. It asks about leading vendors, practical tradeoffs, integration costs, customization, and typical users, but provides only a partial response rather than a market-wide comparison.
One practitioner describes Deltix as supporting several market data representations and optimization approaches, and says its central data warehouse can connect strategies with other components and external tools. The account also mentions a lower-cost retail offering as a route to learning the APIs before moving to an institutional product. Another response lists a range of other products without evaluating them. The discussion offers anecdotal product experience, not independent benchmarks, pricing, or evidence about adoption. It therefore helps identify evaluation dimensions and a few products to investigate, but does not establish which platform is best or how much integration typically costs.
Key ideas
- Commercial trading suites may cover data storage, backtesting, event processing, and live trading.
- A Deltix user reports support for multiple backtest data modes and optimization methods.
- A central data warehouse can serve as an integration point for strategies and external components.
- The discussion does not provide comparative benchmarks, pricing, or evidence of market popularity.
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Full text
# Main backtesting & trading solutions: QuantFactory, Deltix, etc. # Main backtesting & trading solutions: QuantFactory, Deltix, etc. What are the most used/mature/promising commercial solutions today which handle backtesting/ automated trading needs? I'm talking about vertical product suites like QuantFactory or Deltix which address market data capture, historical data, CEP, backtesting, trading, etc. (I would be more specifically interested about the backtesting part though.) - What are the big players here? - Do you have any feedback (pro/cons) about theses solutions? - What is the cost of integrating such a solution into an existing ecosystem? - Are they customizable enough to handle very specific needs? I know that sounds like a lot a different questions, but I'm trying to get a general feeling about these tools (are they popular, useful, who use them, for what, etc.) ## Answer by user509 (score 8) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/634 Some LinkedIn groups are particularily adequate to post these questions. Your question has already been asked in "Automated Trading Strategies" at this URL: Seeking input on QuantFactory, Deltix and 4thStory: Professional end-to-end Automated Trading Solutions. Feel free to let us know the state of your research. ## Answer by Vazgen (score 7) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/4567 I can share my own experience working with the Deltix product suite. As a research and development platform it's very feature rich with support for every back-testing mode there is (BBO, Trade, Midprice, Bar, Level 2 Order Book) and advanced optimization modes (walk-forward, genetic, mean-variance, portfolio optimization, etc). I have built components and external back-office tools to integrate with my strategies. This is easy by building around their central data warehouse (TimeBase) from which a strategy receives input (market data) and can optionally send output to for other strategies and components to pick-up in real time (custom data and inter-strategy event handling). As far as the cost of integrating it into an existing ecosystem, they now have a retail offering (which I'm currently using for freelance development) that is cheaper and a good place to start learning the APIs and porting existing strategies. You'll then have a clear cut upgrade path to the full blown product suite when your work is re-qualified as "institutional". ## Answer by Suminda Sirinath S. Dharmasena (score 1) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/2487 There are many: - Marketctera - iQuantTrader - CEP Trader - IQBroker - Algo Trade - ActiveQuant - TradeLink - Orc - FlexTrade - Portware - Apama - Aleri - etc Try a Google search to find more.
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This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.