Zorro Trader is the most advanced algorithmic trading and quantitative analysis platform available on the market today. It seems the creators of Zorro Trader like to call it a data analysis tool. We will call it an algorithmic trading platform though, and hope nobody will mind. And, indeed, it does beat any other platform we ever used. Zorro Trader is an industry-grade tool that can do anything you could possibly want. From trading strategy research to back-testing and live trading, Zorro Trader got it all. Zorro Trader also comes with a plethora of technical indicators, both new and old, and a great library of statistical tools. Usually, every new version of Zorro Trader adds something more to these features.
Although it is a very complex platform, Zorro Trader is incredibly easy to use, and very fast. Any strategy can be implemented in just a few lines of code, using Lite-C. Essentially, Lite-C is a superset of the classical C programming language. The creators of Zorro Trader have extended the C language with numerous functions, variables, and variable types that pertain to algorithmic trading. Zorro Trader also has excellent market data management capabilities, and a proprietary binary file format (much faster to access than a CSV file or a database).
Hello, World! This is Zorro Trader
In order to exemplify how easy it is to program in Zorro Trader, we will follow the time-honored tradition of the “Hello, World!” program. This is oftentimes the first program a student will write and run. It’s purpose is very simple: to display on the output the message “Hello, World!”. We will spice it up a bit, and add the sentence “This is Zorro Trader.”, which shouldn’t complicate things too much:
function main()
{
printf("Hello, World! This is Zorro Trader.");
}
Any programmer who was exposed to C will notice that the code above is just simple C code. The main() function is and works the same, and also does printf(). Actually, this small program would compile just fine in any C compiler, on any platform. And it does so in Zorro Trader as well. Compiling and running it in Zorro Trader generates, unsurprisingly, the following result:
Hello World! This is Zorro Trader.
Obviously, this isn’t much. And it is certainly not algorithmic trading. But the purpose of this post was just to exemplify that writing code for Zorro Trader is basically writing C code. And C is not a difficult language to become proficient in. Before Python, it was almost always the first programming language a student would learn. Python is easier to learn, but C and Lite-C are orders of magnitude faster. And that certainly matters in algorithmic trading. Learn more with our video tutorial in the members area.
