[ts-gen] Trading shim, TWS forum

[R P Herrold]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007, Curt Smith wrote:

A private inquiry asks:

> [I am looking for] for an options T&S UI.  I'm a long time 
> unix/linux guy so your general docs are familiar.  Your TS 
> wiki has few diagrams of your architecture or options for me 
> wanting a simple as possible installation.

hmmm -- You may have missed the PDF which Bill has written, or 
the one I mentioned just yesterday in the ts-general mailing 
(subscriptions are free at:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/mailman/listinfo ):

      http://www.trading-shim.org/pdfs/manual.pdf
      http://www.herrold.com/commands.pdf (very rough)

Are you familiar with 'xen' virtualization, or VMWare?  Are 
you in a Unix or another OS environment?  The trading-shim 
command line, as a UI, is as 'close to the metal', 'dead plain 
simple' as we can make it consistent with covering the 
features which the upstream TWS API offers.

When we find a complexity, we re-examine our approach to see 
if we can simplify it, as we are doing to the History query 
process at the moment.

> TS is over kill for my wanting a Time and sales real time 
> ui, or your cmd line text output to a window is just fine 
> for a T&S UI too as it turns out.

I suspected that would be the case -- harvesting T and S from 
the syslog narative, and stuffing the detail into a MySQL 
database, has been working here for almost two years.  When we 
designed History, we added the database insert (OHLC, vwap, 
volume) into the shim, rather than needing such a side tool.

It is not clear that this is worthwhile for T and S on a long 
term basis data store; the data is too ephemerial.

I have considered setting up an appliance to make this a 
'black box' under the virtual machines.

> I'm also headed toward auto trading and there's two simple 
> and somewhat popular java projects I've found.

We compile lists at:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/faq/?other-voices
If I've missed one, please let me know; I have not maintained 
that sub-page for a while.

> What might you offer as tips for my options T&S interest?

We have not added formal test coverage for options yet, but 
Time and Sales and all the rest should just work. Please 
consider joining the mailing list and asking some questions as 
I am pretty sure we have some users doing this already-- I 
don't know yet; this is the first expression of interest in 
options we've seen.  ;)

> You tips (shim or non-shim) for auto trading?

As noted at the Trading-Shim website:

 	'We defer to the efforts of others primarily oriented to
 	automated trading ...'

because we think the research space is so unbounded, and first 
want to have a really great tool.

-- Russ Herrold