Thursday, June 4, 2015

Excel's Financial Trading System Capabilities

Excel's Financial Trading System Capabilities

By Arthur Juneau


Building a financial trading system from the wide variety of components available in the market can be daunting. Doing it right requires you to consider multiple functions a typical trading system is required to do, then selecting the best tool for the job.

The first challenge is laying out what you want to achieve on the trading side versus position-keeping, accounting and trade processing. There are a plethora of software platforms available from those less than $200 to massive systems used by global financial institutions. At the beginning you should ask "what do we really need versus want in terms of trader tools?" The answer will help guide the decision-making process as you look at each component of the trader's tool chest.

So, let's say you are a small firm of 10 traders with a range of different strategies you implement every day in the markets. This size firm doesn't merit a massive financial trading system designed for a big investment bank. But the firm's traders also are not small fry -- they trade millions in shares and commodity futures on a daily basis. What they need is something that is highly configurable, modular, easy to understand, easy to change, and does the trick.

The main parts of a financial trading system are the trading strategy builder, watch lists, execution methods, price-volume data module, position tracker, P&L reporting and risk analytics. Depending on your needs, two more components to consider are accounting and an OMS. The boundary between your trading, accounting and order management systems is up to you. You can rely on your broker for much of this.

From a trading strategy and analysis standpoint, Microsoft Excel tends to be one of the top 2 or 3 applications. You can easily program trading strategies directly in Excel with formulas, VBA, and manual user controls such as dropdowns, data entry cells, and macro buttons. A trader can quickly pull in market data (prices, volume, PE ratios, etc.) and combine it with technical and fundamental indicators with simple if-then statements and Excel's native calculation engine. Elaborate pre- and post-trade analysis can be done along with charting and trend analysis in Excel. That's why it's so widely used by Wall Street and City of London traders who have the best desktop trading systems in the world at their disposal.

Small trading shops and invidual traders can execute trades directly in the market by integrating with your broker's execution API. If your firm has an OMS with an API, trade signals originated in Excel can be routed through the OMS and executed at different prime brokers or liquidity centers. Different order types, VWAP and contingent orders can be implemented to ensure best execution.

Implementing an Excel-based financial trading system requires defining the trading strategy, importing and managing price-volume data, computing the right position sizes to balance risk and return, reporting, back testing, graphs, tables, watch lists, etc. You can find add-ins or build components for each part of the process. Add-ins are available for market risk, statistics, greeks, valuation and many other fuctions. A quant can build an entire tool chest in Excel with integrations to FinCad, Matlab and similar software.

If you're planning to implement a financial trading system, Excel is likely to become a major part of your trading operation. Hopefully, these insights will help make the right decisions for your trading success.




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