Hi @adarsh0207, That is somewhat a rhetorical question. And the answer is ‘it depends’ on what you are trying to accomplish.
Ask yourself these questions.
- Do you have a profitable system / model.?
- Is it rules based rather than discretionary?
- Do you trade often? And not able to keep up with manual monitoring?
- Does your system manage risks and position sizing?
If you got 4 ‘Yes’, Algo trading is totally worth it.
Coming to the tools that you are looking at: Zerodha Streak is a good starting point, but they do not have automated execution like Krishnendu has pointed out. Sensibull is an options trading platform and does not have algorithmic trading features.
There are many other players in this market:
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TradeTron is an algo-trading, backtesting and an algo marketplace
- Kuants
- Quantiply
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Squareoff They have pre-built algos as a package and they are launching an algo platform OptionX soon.
And there are many more, but this list is to help you get started. Also a word of caution, I’m not associated with any of these folks and I’m not endorsing any of them. Please do your due diligence before putting your money down.
These platforms should cover for most of the trade scenarios. But If you have very specific requirements, then you should consider hiring a programmer to custom build your system and deploy on a VPS (AWS, Azure etc).
To build custom algo what you need are a ‘live datafeed’ and an ‘order execution’ API. Zerodha Kite Connect is one such solution that is widely used and is stable. But there are recurring fees. Most of the modern stockbrokers in India are offering an API now, some of them are paid some are free(like Aliceblue). There are many ways to doing this. Python is the most popular among retailers but Metatrader is the industry standard among big boys.
“it seems like it is quite new and not used by many” No. Even though India is lagging in algo penetration almost 50% of all the trades in NSE and BSE are algorithmic (mostly driven by the big boys).
“should I wait for getting more experience (like after 1 year) and then use algo trading??” Not necessarily. See, taking it slow and learning it is a great strategy, but there is nothing wrong with doing extensive data analysis and shortening that learning curve. Backtesting will help to validate your ideas using historical data. Then you can do fwd testing for a few weeks/months. And if you can come up with something that has high accuracy, low drawdowns and short losing streaks, then why not get on with it?!
Hope that helps, and good luck with your algo journey!