QuoteOriginally posted by: WarwickGradhow do i do the following:automate a trade based on data coming from a news terminal such as bloomberg/reutersie. US gdp data comes in better than expected, therefore i'd like to buy x contacts of the dow jones futures indexis this what is termed as a black box?lots of traders are doing this, so what makes one system faster than the other?i'm a day trader, with lots of trading ideas i'd like to implement, whats the going rate for hiring a programmer to implement these strategies?thanksI would forget about programmers for the moment unless they can help you with a basic first step.It seems obvious to me that the first step is to do a serious study of exactly -how- the information is released, andthe speed of all the disseminators that you can think of. Then, do you have any -really good- ideas about getting it faster than just about everybody? (where faster may meana small fraction of a second) -- assuming you are trying to not break any laws. Since Bloomberg or Reuters or Dow Jones have a zillionsubscribers, how could the the answer involve them? (honest question.) If you are stuck at that stage (the likely outcome), then save your money.Perhaps possible, but still difficult, is that if you study -every- macro release in this manner, there might be one where you see an idea. Surely this is a road that 1000 hedge funds and 10,000 others have already travelled, but technology changes and good ideas are rare.If you -do- have such an idea, then please post it for forum discussion and move on to the trade execution issues, with similar questions.regards,

Quotewhat if we're trading during the day, and add the news release trades as well, do u think the market makers still get pissed off?Unless you are losing lot of money during the day and not making it back during the news maybe, but they are still more likely to widen your spreads or reject your orders. Quotewould it be better to write a c++ program to do this? rather then use some1 off rentacoder? or isnt it that simple?If you are able to write a c++ code than you wouldn’t need somebody else. My impression was that you needed a programmer to do this for youQuotei'm not just referring to currency markets, but all electronically traded futures marketsLiquidity dries up even with the most liquid futures markets during news announcements. That doesn't mean you won't get filled, just add in significant slippage to your trading system results, exchanges are different than currencies in that sense.

thanks for the helpful comments, let me do some investigation and will let u know what develops, thanks lads

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