some of you may have noticed that I was looking for the perfect trading app for trading on the go, as I usually trade from my smartphone or my tablet. As most of you are aware, the usual mobile versions of the trading apps do not allow custom indicators. I had some ideas from metatrader that I wanted to incorporate into my everyday trading so I had basically a few options, as I saw it:
- Trade/chart remotely through a VNC app with having metatrader with custom indicators on my home/rented server. This is a pain, since one needs to rent the space or maintan a windows box at home, and I wouldn't like trading through VNC.
- Trade from a full Windows tablet, which allows for running full Windows applications like the MT4. Painful to deal with the quirky old metatrader, unless buying some top notch hardware (like the MS Surface), which is expensive and given the annoying experience with the MT, best to skip this one. Also, there are occasions when I'd like to trade from my phone, which would then again not work.
- Get an open source trading platform. Choices are limited as most packages are for sale, and do not allow custom indicators anyway. There is Argo which is actually quite nice, and would be possible to use. However, to figure out how to run it would also require time, and a lot of fiddling.
- Make my own charting and trading app. A LOT of work, but (I thought) the best solution. My Broker has a REST api that can e used for this purpose, an using Python and Matplotlib I could make an app relatively easily (Pythonista for ios supports matplotlib, UIs etc.)
It is clear that all of these choices leave a lot to be desired. I have today finally found out the best solution for my situation which I would like to share. Use the TradingView (free) Chart environment. It allows for simple (although different than MT4) scripting and custom indicator construction. Upon finding out about this, 15 minutes later I got my first custom indicator in TV, visible on my iPhone. TV only allows me to paper trade, but it is easy to follow the situation on my phone, and then switch to my broker's app and execute the live trade. Not perfect (some chart types are only available in the paid subscription model), but compared to any of the above options, a huge improvement with a lot of time, effort and money saved.
Cheers,
k