Hi guys, long time no see.
I would like to do the following, but I am curious whether what is the right programming language:
The program should access a website and check the current stock price (note: this fluctuates every second).
If the website’s stock price reaches certain value, it should “click” on a “Buy” button.
Is this even possible? Thanks.
It is possible, but depending on what you really want to do with it, it might be illegal or at least immoral, because you’re getting an unfair advantage. That’s why you have many websites having security anti-bot measures, like captcha, recaptcha… If you want to learn more about it google bots…
There are already existing programs that buy and sell at specific thresholds. There is nothing illegal about it. Immoral is in the eye of the beholder.
The issue here is getting it to interface with another web page and act upon it. I’m sure there is some technology to do that, I’ve just never dealt with it.
The legality comes into play when you violate the user agreement with the service provider that is trying to level the playing field. I’m not talking e-bay, I’m talking about payed services which stand to lose subscribers if they don’t take the issue of spam buying seriously. As far as tech goes, I only know about JAVA and jSpringBot, although I never used it myself
That is a good point - whatever site he is using to buy stocks may have a TOU. It may not be illegal in general but could be a violation of an agreement.
You can use javascript. You’d need to inspect the existing page to find out what variable the stock price is going into and what method the ‘buy’ button calls and then you just have your code run whenever the price changes, run it’s logic and call the buy method if it needs to.
Although I suppose there might be a legal issue I don’t see a moral one at all - what if you built a fully working human android and sat it at the computer, watching the screen for you? or you paid a real human to do it for you? I don’t see how that could be immoral. It’s only money anyway.
In general, when companies expose functionality on the web, I don’t think they get the right to say what sort of browser you use to access it with and I would see this as just ‘extending the functionality’ of your browser.
Thanks guys. I read that it could be possible through VB .NET, would you it easier with javascript?
Well, it’s an old topic and fun reads. You don’t want to run a browser up and make a bot to click some buttons. It’s all APIs.
There are lot of stock trading algorithms/AI running around by big crops actually. To a point that they say they rents server room next to the trading center for big money to reduce dozen milliseconds of network latency.