TuringTrader goes Beta
We consider TuringTrader production quality. Check the TuringTrader 16 announcement.
After ten months of development, we reached a significant milestone this month: TuringTrader goes beta!
It’s been a fun ride. When we started the project in September 2018, it was just a little pet project. It went better than we thought, and in late October, we had all of Bertram Solutions algorithms ported to the new simulator and online in live trading. In early December, we named the project TuringTrader and created this website for it. In the following months, we kept making TuringTrader more useful by adding more features. At the same time, TuringTrader became more complicated to adopt. So we decided to prioritize usability over features for a while. This release is much bigger than any prior version, and at times we felt a bit overwhelmed. Today, we are proud to show the results.
Here is a summary of what has changed:
- Binary Distribution: we now have a standard Windows Setup Wizard, installing a binary version of TuringTrader with just a few clicks. Read more on this here.
- Fully standalone: TuringTrader no longer requires developers to install Visual Studio, Excel, or R. There are two significant features behind this: running algorithms from source code, and native report templates.
- New data sources: we wanted to make the out-of-box experience as pleasant as possible, avoiding any steps that slow you down before running your first simulation. That’s why we created a new default data source, loading data from Yahoo. Going from there, we wanted to have a great experience without paying for a data subscription. We achieved that with the new Tiingo data source.
- Rewritten Quick Start Guide: to soften the learning curve, we have rewritten significant parts of our documentation and streamlined others.
- We have made many improvements to the UI, making TuringTrader feel a bit more pleasant and familiar.
- Under the hood, we have switched from .NET Framework to .NET Core 3, putting us on a path to being cross-platform one day.
And yes, this all comes at a cost. If you have been developing with TuringTrader before, you might find that your code needs a few tweaks. None of the changes required should take you more than a few minutes to make, but we are quite aware that this is annoying. However, we felt that all of these changes were important to avoid racking up technical debt.
So, what’s the hold-up?