This is something I've been working on for quite a while, coming up on 2.5 years. I've always been dissatisfied with most off-the-shelf trading platforms. Dysfunctional, bloated UI and uncomfortable interaction make them difficult to use, especially in my case where pace is needed. The only software currently available I am somewhat satisfied with is T4 by cunningham trading systems, in addition to it being quite intuitive the team around it are extremely helpful, special thanks to Ryan in sales and Brian on the development side for providing API access free of charge for all these years, very helpful for a once broke teen. The only other platform that met my requirements was the now discontinued Trading Technologies (TT)  X_Trader. The new trading technologies platform is web based and has lost all the retro charm of the old platform built in visual c++. The GUI of GT is a near perfect replication of the old X_Trader platform, a nod my interest early trading software from the transitional period to electronic trading , a time where TT X_trader was all that was available (if you wanted to win). GT is built in c# on the .net framework, I choose to run it on windows vista and/or windows 7. I have managed to get it running on windows XP with some kernel tweaks though.GT currently uses the CTS .api though I am beginning to implement my own FIX engine for order routing currently. I have found GT to be significantly faster in terms of market data handling than any other trading software, order submission and modification is on par with others though.

My news and research project was a little less long winded and I am no longer working on it. The idea came about as I was searching for an alternative to the thomson reuters Eikon software which at the time was costing me nearly $4000 yearly, a lot to pay for news headlines as I did not use any of the other features! As a very LTF trader (<1 second), I'm not very interested in playing on the state of the macroeconomy, thus most economic indicators and fundemental data is of little use, I just needed something to deliver headlines fast, and look good whilst doing it!

I've used a combination of a json api, RSS feeds, web scraping and snooping on API endpoints. I have many people using this software, just pay your own API costs.

First up is a standalone market profiling software. Market profiling aims to collate each days trading into a probablility distribution made up of letters, each representing 30 minutes of the trading day. I've added the ability to change the bin size for the distrubutions. This was more of a test for my GDI+ skills as I beleive that market profiling is pseudoscience at best, comparable to chiro and psychiatry.

FIXDapter is my in-house FIX engine. It is available as a .net or c++ library. It allows you to easily intitialize a TCP client, easily format and send messages by specifying tags and recieve messages dessiminated by message type (TAG 35). In the .net version it even provides event handlers which can be individually registered by incoming message type! I use it over SSL with Stunnel

Ticker is a simple market data recording software, It simply uses an unfiltered market-by-price data feed and saves the data in a structured CSV for later use or research. Originally a console app I've since made a GUI with a market depth heatmap!