There’s really no answer to this question that is appropriate to all situations. Whether or not it makes sense to hire a programmer will always depend on your specific circumstances.

In the short article that follows, I’ll quickly explore some of the things that you might want to consider. Hopefully, this will allow you to structure your decision-making, and help you to avoid unnecessary costs to determine the right way forward for you and your trading business.

How Much Capital Do You Have?

Programming costs money. Whilst I believe that our own TradeStation Programming Service is highly competitive because we offer a fixed price model (meaning that you know the maximum spend for your project ahead of time, and will never be met with spiralling hourly bills to achieve the outcome you want), there’s still a cost involved.

The best approach to weighing this up is perhaps to consider the programming expense as a percentage of the capital that you have available to trade or invest with. If you’re running a hedge fund or family office, then the costs of programming are likely to be totally negligible, and it might even make sense to employ someone in-house.  But if you’re starting out with a thousand dollars to trade the e-minis, then even a single programming project is a big expense as a portion of your capital, and would require substantial justification.

Happily, most traders fall somewhere in between these two extremes. That’s when it’s time to start thinking about how open-ended your programming needs are likely to be…

How Limited in Scope is your Project?

Do you just need a single indicator or strategy programming, which you know will provide everything that you need move forward? Or do you just have an idea, which may or may not work, and which you’ll then probably want to refine or displace with other ideas?

If you know your project is limited in scope and is easily affordable in relation to your capital, and that it’s not something you can easily achieve on your own (see below), then hiring a programmer probably makes sense. You’ll save your own time, and you should quickly end up with whatever you need to progress your trading. Once the coding work has been completed for you, then you move forwards and quite possibly never need another piece of coding work ever again.

If what you think you’re going to need over time is any more open-ended, then it might be wise to look at how complex your requirements are, and whether it would be beneficial to learn the coding skills required to do the work yourself.

How Complex is your Project?

If you’ve no background in coding at all, then this might not seem like an easy question to answer. But many of the programming enquiries we receive are extremely basic. In fact, some of them don’t even require programming work. TradeStation offers a variety of indicators, studies, and strategies that allow for real-time customization without requiring an in-depth understanding of EasyLanguage. These pre-designed studies are tailored for quick customization, enabling you to effortlessly incorporate simple formulas or functions and instantly access the analysis you want. These tools can be seamlessly integrated into both charting and RadarScreen.

There are countless great resources available online, from both TradeStation and third party providers, to help you learn how to use EasyLanguage to implement your ideas. If what you’re wanting to do isn’t complicated, then you’d probably be surprised how easy it would be to learn how to code it yourself.

If you’re wanting to learn more about EasyLanguage, then I recommend visiting Jeff Swanson’s excellent site EasyLanguageMastery.com. As well as offering tutorials and resources to help you improve your programming, his blog is packed full of great tips and ideas for strategy development in general.

One of the great things about the fact that EasyLanguage uses normal-English terms is that it becomes easy to take a trial-and-error approach to tweaking existing code from any of the many online resources until you get it to do what you what. It’s often intuitive to the extent that someone with a good general knowledge of trading can start to make alterations to most code and have a fair idea of what the outcome will be. As soon as you develop any confidence with this approach, then you’ll also be able to start adding to your knowledge with more complex coding concepts on an as-you-need basis.

All of this isn’t to say that EasyLanguage isn’t ever complex – some projects are inherently complex and require more sophisticated approaches, whether that’s manipulating multi-dimensional arrays, integrating external data sources, or building custom user interfaces.

Still Unsure Whether You Need a Programmer?

If you’re still not sure whether professional programming work is the right way forward for you, then you can always drop us an email and give us a brief outline of your situation and requirements. In fact, we always recommend contacting us to discuss your project before ordering.

We always try to provide honest and unbiased advice, and we don’t try to charge you for things that we know that you don’t need – we’re traders ourselves and we know how precious your capital is.

If what you require is simple, we’ll tell you so and discourage you from wasting your capital on unnecessary programming. And if what you need is genuinely complex then we’ll always advise you honestly.