Shane Bow learned trading the hard way — On his own, with his own money. He read every book on the subject that he could get get his hands on. Then he dove in full-time writing systems to automate his he new business. He is a smart guy, an engineer and computer scientist, but he still lost 80% on his early investments.

But after these false starts, Shane started to win consistently after realizing the most important tools for a trader, are not the software, but rather the mind: Discipline in position sizing, leverage, exit strategy, and the patience to wait for high probability entries.

WormTrader software is an extensible suite of Java applications that facilitate automated trading of the stock market from an Interactive Brokers account:

• Auto Trader – Employs a real-time feed combined with local historical data to day trade multiple securities with multiple strategies and stop loss methods. Strategies are coded to process bars and indicators in real-time to issue trading signals. The program can be configured to trade the signals fully automatically or else to prompt the user. Stops can be likewise configured.
• Trade Manager – This record keeping and performance monitoring tool downloads and tracks executions to allow analysis of trades by combinations of symbol, date, strategy, and security type.
• Back Tester – Simulates the behavior of the Auto Trader on historical data. Multiple symbols, strategies, and stop methods may be selected for each run over a specified date range. Trades may be fully analyzed using the Trade Manager.
• Chart Trainer – An enhanced paper trader that provides an effective way to practice day trading stocks using multiple frames. Select a particular symbol and date to trade in order to relive an actual day in the market. Alternatively, the program can randomly generate episodes. Episodes are tracked to provide performance analysis similar to that in Trade Manager.
• Analyzer – Prepare to trade before the market opens. Screens filter the data to search for trading opportunities: Examples include list of stocks with bearish engulfing candlesticks and rising stochastics. Any combination of indicators can be employed in a screen. Quickly pull up charts of the resulting stocks to decide if they will be trade candidates for the day and import them into the autotrader.
  Alternatively, run the screen on a date in the past to generate stocks to practice on with the Chart Trainer.