At the moment I have about 2000 trades which are priced using excel. I have found that the sheets aren’t very reliable and 4 out of 5 days will break for no reason. Also, the way the pricing sheets work is the pull the market data piece by piece, use it then delete it again. This is a nightmare if I need to re-run pricing as it is so slow.
Ideally I would love to build a GUI in a more reliable language, which is less liable to break down and faster. However, outside of excel my skills are limited.
I would like a few tabs on the GUI:
One to view the basics of the trades – type, maturity etc etc.
One to view the market data
Another to display the results of EOD p&l
All market data, trade data and static data come in XML form.
What is the best language to build this in? What kind of database could handle this data and how would it be setup?
I realise that this is a pretty big task, but its not something I want to do asap. I plan on doing it piece by piece. I’m also doing it for the experience! I would appreciate any help given!
I would recommend that you use Java. It is a very easy language to learn compared to other languages with similar capabilities. Java has a very simple GUI API called Swing that is effective and very easy to learn. It supports a similar display to excel using the class JTable. Setting up a database to work with Java is also relatively simple: you can write your own or use an SQL server.