Cymatic Trader Community

[Rav]

Nice bit of kit!!

Still evaluating it, but seems most promising. Any plans to allow connections to Excel spreadsheets in order to enable further market analysis?

Many thanks
Rav

[Gavin]

Hi Rav,

Thanks for your message.

Yes, connectivity to Excel is on my list of features to add. I am certainly keen to add it as soon as possible but I am not able to give a timescale yet.

Kind regards,

Gavin

[Rav]

Cheers Gavin, I look forward to your innovations. Your software does seem to offer a different angle on the markets which is always a good thing. Keep up the good work!

Rav

[Gavin]

Hi Rav,
Thanks for your kind feedback, I really appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Gavin

[JayBee]

Hello,

May I request that you don't go down the Excel route? At least, not the way that Gruss and Bet Angel have. I hated both implementations and ended up writing my own programs.

I code programs to process data to my specification and then execute orders through Cymatic. It's the perfect hybrid system for me.

I never went down the Excel programming route as I found that there is so much extra baggage in Excel that it is too slow. Also I can trade every race in parallel, which Gruss and Bet Angel are not readily suited to.

What I would like though would be for some API that we can code to. Therefore if somone wants to access Cymatic through Excel then as with Gruss they can use some sort of COM object (or whatever the latest fad is) or I can access a dll via Visual Studio and my programs.

I think this would make everyone happy. Of course there will be non-programmers who will want Excel and everything done for them but if you can plan the coding such that you build a dll along the way and then use that for your VBA in Excel to access. That will satisfy the non-coder and coders like me.

Ideally I would like to access betting and limit monitoring through Cymatic. Your program is great and I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Therefore I just want an API to send a bet to and then set up any limits for profit taking and stop losses.

Thank you.

[Gavin]

Hi JayBee,

Thanks for your interesting message.

About 7-8 years ago, before Cymatic existed, I experimented with writing an automated trading system in Excel, using the Excel link with one of the other Betfair programs. I was able to do quite a lot, but as my program became more complex I noticed that Excel seemed to not be the fastest or most efficient environment for the job. So I do concur with your comments. I don't know to what extent that Betfair app added to the inefficiency and whether it was suitably optimized, but I know from other work that I have done using Excel, that Excel becomes can be a bit slow for building complex systems.

However, I think some users will still want Excel as it can be used to do quite a lot of automated trading, reasonably easily. Sample code would also be easy to provide to get them started.

I have also used Excel for various other tasks over the years, for example modelling automated trading systems for baskets of equities, charting financial tick data in real time, etc. One one occassion I built up quite a complicated model in Excel, including real time chart of prices, but again I did notice the limitations of Excel in terms of speed. Some optimization can be achieved by choosing the most appropriate events in Excel upon which to trigger your code logic so that you only fire the events for just the relevant data. However I do agree that Excel is not the best system in which to build very large and complex automated trading systems, but that some users will do doubt find it invaluable for some automated trading at a reasonable speed.

Yes, I have sometimes thought that I should look into also offering some sort of Cymatic API / DLL library / COM automation, for programmers to work with, perhaps this is something that I should work on eventually. I think this would be a great idea, although as yet I am not sure what demand there would be, perhaps other users / coders will respond to this topic.

A massive amount of work has been done integrating Cymatic with the Betfair API, so offering a Cymatic API would save other programmers having to repeat all that work. I have also spent years developing Cymatic as both a GUI trading platform and as an engine for my own automated trading, so there are quite a lot of 'wheels' that other programmers could avoid re-inventing if the Cymatic environment could be accessed by other programmers for trading on Betfair.

I wonder what demand is there for a Cymatic programmers framework / API wrapper and whether that would be ever be profitable for Cymatic.

Thanks again for your thoughts and for starting this discussion.

Best wishes,

Gavin

[JayBee]

Thanks for the detailed reply Gavin.

I always port ideas built in Excel to bespoke code written under Visual Studio. A speed comparison between a Monte Carlo sim on Excel and the same in VB.NET is enormous. I like to create my ideas free-form in Excel and then move them as soon as possible to a standalone program.

When I worked for Reuters there was a Reuter Terminal add-on for Excel. It could update fast enough but then when you added your own code to manipulate the data stream everything bogged down.

I rather think that I am probably in a very small minority when it comes to wanting certain functionalities in your application.

I would be willing to collaborate somewhow if there was mutual benefit. If you intend going commericial in the future then that might need extra bums on seats. Trading system development I would consider too with all the necessary NDAs.

[Gavin]

Hi JayBee,

It sounds like we have had really similar experiences of Excel and its benefits and limitations. I am not sure whether there will be more of a requirement for bums on seats in the future, but I'll certainly keep in mind what you have said about any opportunities that arise in the future. From time to time I do get asked to do bespoke robots, but I always decline because I am busy enough already, so perhaps another bum could be involved there at some point in the future if API access had been sorted out.

Thanks again for all your thoughts so far.

Best wishes,

Gavin

[adenlark]

Hello guys,

I'm intrigued by the idea of a Cymatic API, and the benefits it would have over using excel. The coding skills I learned at school (Basic and Pascal, if I recall correctly!) are about 30 years out of date, but I'd have no hesitation learning a modern programming language, and making good use of the API. The technical details and difference between a com interface and and API are beyond me, so I won't involve myself in that part of the discussion.

I've had a little experience of using excel with other software, but my efforts were limited to some basic bookmaking and dutching spreadsheets, and a very simple bot. I found excel very useful, but also quite frustrating at times, for the same reasons you guys have already mentioned. As much as I'd like to see a Cymatic API, I think that excel connectivity may appeal to more users. While it may not be ideal for complex bots, it could be used to add other functionality to Cymatic, such as dutching, bookmaking, or the 'Lay the Draw' strategy suggestion also mentioned on this forum.

Happy trading!

[Gavin]

Hi Adenlark,

Many thanks for your input. It is interesting to hear that you make use of Excel functionaility for a variety of uses that do not necessarily just involve creating robots. I have also had quite a lot of requests from users who want various non-complex automated tasks added to Cymatic (not just robots), that are a little too specific to include in the main Cymatic app, but which users could add themselves if an Excel link was available. So I am fairly convinced that an Excel link will be used by a good number of people for various uses.

Ideally the Cymatic API suggestion could be viewed as something that is not mutually exclusive with Excel, both routes may be beneficial, just to different people. Obviously time is limited, so I'd have to implement things in the order of demand, which probably means adding Excel first which is probably also the easier and quicker of the two jobs.

I am starting to think that their could be some demand for the API suggestion, so hopefully there will be more feedback on that topic from other users too.

Thanks again and best wishes,

Gavin