Hey all,

I've attempted to do automated trading on and off for several years, and discretionary trading for many more, with mixed results. My biases always interfered with making good trading decisions. I tried to learn R as my first programming language, but I was overwhelmed. Zorro, so far, is all I could have hoped for. The programming is easy to learn, and jcl's tutorials and website have been a great resource for new ideas and programming practice. I've just started and I know there are ups and downs, but the Z systems give me the confidence that successful automated systems are possible and I hope to share my ideas as I learn.

I would recommend to trade the Z-Systems first on demo accounts of your broker.
On my demo accounts I don't get the performance from the backtests. Z12 seems to be in a DD since beginning of the year.

Thanks for the suggestion. Without knowing what is "under the hood" of the Z systems, I am reluctant to blindly follow them anyway. The fact that someone with very little programming experience can understand and write trading systems with lite-C and Zorro gives me some hope. Learning R or Python or FXCM's coding language was always a roadblock for me.

IMO Zorro is a trading SDK with its 'trading interface' as the main advantage, means its libraries to analyze, control and evaluate price curves and trades that run in the background without need to care about. There would be a lot of programming work to do otherwise before you can use e.g. a command like "enterLong/Short" and control its trades with TMFs. I don't know if there are similar libraries for R or Python anyhow. Zorro's program language is a C derivate and therefore it is ... at least very fast! But you have to learn it like any other program language.