automatic stock trader

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: automatic stock trader by jeffa (Bishop) on Feb 01, 2004 at 01:53 UTC
While this is no trivial matter, WWW::Mechanize makes the task a bit easier. Just search this site for WWW::Mechanize and you will find example code. If you have any specific troubles, please feel free to post those questions as well. :) jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply]
Re: automatic stock trader by Corion (Patriarch) on Feb 01, 2004 at 17:02 UTC
While WWW::Mechanize is the sure way to go if you want to venture down that route, let me add some words of caution: Your automatic stock trader will rely on market data provided presumably electronically. Please, don't be stupid and make sure that you attribute "freshness" to your market data, so that you don't buy and sell upon stale data that is 15 minutes old (or even older). I know of commercially sold trading systems, that even are completely scriptable, which do not have any concept of freshness of market data, but which have problems with their interfaces, so that, for example, the buying price might become stale while the selling price still updates. In such a situation, your automatic stock trader would issue buying contracts upon the stale data and sell to prices based on fresh data, and the difference would kill you if it were left to run unsupervised. I is a sad fact, but there is no money-making machine that simply produces money while you don't watch... `perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ; # The $d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider ($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new #in the HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' # web` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: automatic stock trader by keymon (Beadle) on Feb 01, 2004 at 16:56 UTC
I remember doing this in the good old days of E*Trade IPOs. It is not too difficult to do, unless Ameritrade makes extensive use of JavaScript. Just click through and place the order once, but save all of the intermediate pages. Next, poke around in the source to see what forms are being submitted, and with what values. From there, automation is easy.	[reply]