Building a money machine - Part 2

Ok, I'm back and will try to stick to the original plan. The next question we should ask is where to trade. The question can be interpreted to multiple sub-questions such as: What Market and By which channel. We already raised the "What Market" issue earlier in the previous post (Equities, Futures, Forex, ...) and I hope you already decided where you feel most comfortable with, the Which Channel question however is the question we should decide on at that phase.
There are plenty of possible channels out there. Some companies will give you a trading platform assuming you are using their firm for account management through that platform, others will provide trading tools that can work with other brokerage firms, or will provide trading tools that expose only the information but would not let you trade through these tools. Another possibility is to work directly with the bank. If the system that you are willing to build would not need massive daytrading care, this might be a good solution, just note that if your system is going to generate many trading transactions you will have to do lot of manual checking by yourself, and probably the commission you'll pay will cost more than the trading tools that uses a brokerage firm. Another possibility is to build your own trading machine that connects directly to the bank or to the exchange market, this is the most expensive solution that worth doing only if you are a real professional, trade in high volumes - I suggest you'll consider that possibility only after you check the others and gain the required confidence (and skills) and willing to do it all by yourself.
For the time being, trading tools such as TradeStation might be good enough for starting (and maybe even more than that). The tool provides real-time screening capabilities, exposes an easy programming language that can help you define your trading strategies and have lot of help and programming forums in the net that can help you build a system and check it by yourself by using the built-in backtesting capabilities. - There are more platforms that provides similar capabilities, I would not describe them since I'm not familiar with all of them, for now let's assume that this is the tool just to enable getting forward to the next step.

So, I decided to use the TradeStation platform for now (you will make your own decision, I would not make any recommendation on that issue) - the question now is what system I want to build using the tool, how to build the system, how to test it, how to know that it works, etc.

Ok, Building the system issue will be dealt in my future posts.