Trading on Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu 16.04

Trading · 04 Jan 2018

I wrote my own backtesting and live trading software called ArgonTrader in C# and use it to trade with Interactive Brokers. I run it on my Raspberry Pi. In this post I describe my setup.

This post uses Ubuntu 16.04 as a base. If you want to use Ubuntu 18.04 instead you should check out my other post.

Ubuntu MATE on the Pi

I like Ubuntu and that is why I chose to install Ubuntu MATE on the Raspberry Pi. I prefer it over the default Raspbian. Ubuntu MATE can be downloaded here.

I wrote the disk image onto my micro SDHC card, inserted it into the Pi and followed the setup instructions. The setup worked flawlessly and afterwards I had a working Ubuntu.

I used raspi-config to change some default configurations settings and enabled ssh and set the screen resolution.

VNC Server

I installed the tightvncserver vnc server package in Ubuntu so that I am able to log in remotely.

sudo apt install tightvncserver

After installing the server I followed this tutorial to setup the vnc server as a service and also configure the screen resolution.

Open the service file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@.service

Insert this content and replace the user name and change the resolution.

/etc/systemd/system/vncserver@.service 
[Unit]
Description=Start TightVNC server at startup
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=sammy
PAMName=login
PIDFile=/home/sammy/.vnc/%H:%i.pid
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :%i > /dev/null 2>&1
ExecStart=/usr/bin/vncserver -depth 24 -geometry 1280x800 :%i
ExecStop=/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :%i

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I enabled the vnc server service with the following command and now I am able to connect with a VNC Viewer application from my desktop machine to Ubuntu.

sudo systemctl start vncserver@1

Mono

My own trading software is written in C# and under Linux I need Mono to run it. I followed the instructions to install the most up to date Mono from their homepage:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official.list
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install mono-complete

Oracle Java

For running the IB Gateway trading software I needed the Oracle JDK. This can be installed with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

You can then check the installed version with

java -version

IB Gateway

Installing the IB Gateway is a bit tricky. The default setup for linux includes its own JVM and does not support ARM. It cannot be installed on the Raspberry Pi without modification.

There is a IB Gateway Standalone version. It is possible to run this one on the Raspberry Pi but unfortunately in my tests it did not work well with the current API 9.72 and had errors when I was trying to make trades.

I wanted the most current stable version of IB Gateway on the Raspberry Pi. To make the installer work on ARM it is possible to edit it with vim in binary mode:

vim -b ibgateway-stable-standalone-linux-x64.sh

At the beginning there is a line with INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME_OVERRIDE. I uncommented it and pointed it to the installed Java Virtual Machine.

INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME_OVERRIDE=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/

A bit further down in the script there is a test_jvm() function which does a version check. Modifying the version numbers that are checked for, so that the installed jvm will be accepted, allows one to run the script.

More precicely there is the following code, that needs to be changed. Just set the version to the one you have.

 if [ "$ver_major" = "" ]; then
   return;
 fi
 if [ "$ver_major" -lt "1" ]; then
   return;
 elif [ "$ver_major" -eq "1" ]; then
   if [ "$ver_minor" -lt "8" ]; then
     return;
   elif [ "$ver_minor" -eq "8" ]; then
     if [ "$ver_micro" -lt "0" ]; then
       return;
     elif [ "$ver_micro" -eq "0" ]; then
       if [ "$ver_patch" -lt "152" ]; then
         return;
       fi
     fi
   fi
 fi

 if [ "$ver_major" = "" ]; then
   return;
 fi
 if [ "$ver_major" -gt "1" ]; then
   return;
 elif [ "$ver_major" -eq "1" ]; then
   if [ "$ver_minor" -gt "8" ]; then
     return;
   elif [ "$ver_minor" -eq "8" ]; then
     if [ "$ver_micro" -gt "0" ]; then
       return;
     elif [ "$ver_micro" -eq "0" ]; then
       if [ "$ver_patch" -gt "152" ]; then
         return;
       fi
     fi
   fi
 fi

After successful installation the same modifications have to be done to the launcher script for IB Gateway.

Conclusion

After all these steps I am able to run my trading bot on the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is fast enough for my purposes, I trade only at the end of the day. Installing the IB Gateway is a bit tricky but doable.