Hi there,Has anyone had any experience of using ROOT in finance? ROOT is the data analysis framework used at the large hadron collider. http://root.cern.ch/drupal/ I've got a job where I'm back-testing market-making algo strategies. What I'd like to do is run the strategies over past data and optimize them. As I have a particle physics background I was thinking of using ROOT to store and run over the data. The job basically requires looping over tick data so the data sets are going to be massive. This is why I'm considering ROOT. The company currently uses matlab and R but they don't really do what I'm coming in to do. I was just wondering if anyone has got any experience of using ROOT in finance or if there's any similar packages on the market. I know ROOT can be hard to program and the class structure isn't very good so I have my reservations. Any thoughts?

>>> The job basically requires looping over tick data so the data sets are going to be massive. This is why I'm considering ROOTI really dont see the point of using ROOT for processing the data. What you need for backtesting is a tool to simulate the exchange. The exchange needs to be able to send orderbook and trades and receive quotes or orders from your strategy. Wheter you are using a flat file or ROOT. The performance should be fairly the same.You want to use ROOT for which purposes?

Well in a Root tree the data is compressed more than a flat file and is somewhat quicker to run over. But also in a ROOT tree when you loop over the data it is optimized so as you can only look at what you need to and so it becomes a lot quicker to do. Not all the strategies I'm testing look at the same variables but I'd still like all the data in one place so this was why I'm thinking of using ROOT. Also, once I've got the results out I can use ROOT to plot histograms and graphs with. However, the main reason I'm thinking of using it is my familiarity with it and my lack of experience with anything else so maybe this is the wrong tool for me. Ideally I would like to be able to fully simulate the exchange and feed in past data rather than exchange data. Writing a wrapper for the companies current software to run over past data is the other solution I was thinking of. I'm not sure how easy this will be to do. I really need everything optimized for speed so as I can repeatedly run over the data changing the strategy parameters each time optimizing for PnL.