For that kind, you don't really need any specific software. You can do it in Ruby/Python/Haskell/Whatever. As long as you can communicate with an API (Yahoo Fin

For that kind, you don't really need any specific software. You can do it in Ruby/Python/Haskell/Whatever. As long as you can communicate with an API (Yahoo Finance to download the data for example and one broker that allows you API access to issue orders) any language will do. You can run your software once a month or week, analyse the data and issue the orders. If you are keen, you can even use Google News/NLP/Sentiment Analysis in your model, again, in any languages you want. Take a look at: quantstart.com He has some tutorials with Python to do so, and he is releasing a book (hopefully soon) that should give you a good overview of it all. Also, I recommend you read Options, Futures and Other Derivatives to understand how most of this financial instruments work. There is a lot of good information there.