Signal Publishing Service API

This document details the API for building Signal Publishing Service extensions for WealthLab 8. These extensions represent remote services that can be selected in the WL8 Signals Publisher tool. You can publish trading Signals to a publishing service by linking a WL8 Strategy to a Remote Strategy that's defined on the service.

Build Environment

You can create a Signal Publishing Service in a .NET development tool such as Visual Studio 2022. Create a class library project that targets .NET8, then reference the WealthLab.Core library DLL that you'll find in the WL8 installation folder.

Note: If you are using Visual Studio 2022, it will need to be updated to at least version 17.8.6 to use .NET8.

Your Signal Publishing Service will be a class in this library that descends from SignalPublishingServiceBase, which is defined in the WealthLab.Core library, in the WealthLab.Core namespace. After you implement and build your library, simply copy the resulting assembly DLL into the WL8 installation folder. The next time WL8 starts up, it will discover your Signal Publishing Service, making it available in appropriate locations of the WL8 user interface.

Accessing the Host (WL8) Environment

The IHost interface allows your extension to access information about the user's WealthLab environment. For example, the location of the user data folder, or obtaining a list of DataSets defined by the user. At any point in your extension's code base, you can access an instance of the IHost interface using the singleton class WLHost and its Instance property. Example:

//get user data folder
string folder = WLHost.Instance.DataFolder;

Descriptive Properties

The Configurable class, which SignalPublishingServiceBase descends from, provides descriptive properties that control how your Signals Publishing Service appears in WL8. The most important ones to override are Name, GlyphResource, Description, and URL.

public virtual string ManageSignalsURL(RemoteStrategyInfo rsi) 

Override this method to return a URL on the remote publishing service that will allow the user to manage the signals on-site for the indicated Remote Strategy.

Login Credentials

public virtual bool RequiresLogin

Indicates that the Signal Publishing Service requires a login and returns true by default. When true, causes User Name and Password inputs to become enabled in the Linked Strategy configuration dialog.

public string UserName

Accesses the User Name that the user entered when creating a Linked Strategy.

public string Password

Accesses the Password that the user entered when creating a Linked Strategy.

public virtual string CheckLogin() 

Override this method to perform an authentication check with the remote publishing service using the UserName and Password. If the login was successful, return null, otherwise return an appropriate error message.

Getting Remote Strategies

Remote Strategies are the Signal Publishing Service API's way of referring to the publishable "slots" that a remote publishing service offers. A service might provide only a single slot (like Wealth$im on WealthLab.com) or let you create one or more slots of your own (like WealthSignals.) Each slot is represented as an instance of the RemoteStrategyInfo class.

RemoteStrategyInfo has three properties:

• RemoteStrategyName - the Remote Strategy name as it appears on the service.
• RemoteStrategyID - a string representation of the Remote Strategy's unique ID.
• Tag - an object that you can assign an implementation-specific details.

public abstract List<RemoteStrategyInfo> GetPublishedStrategies()

Override this method to return a list of RemoteStrategyInfo instances that represent the available publishing slots.

During this method you'll create the RemoteStrategyInfo instances and assign their Name, ID, and Tags. When WL8 loads persisted Signals Publisher data on startup, however, the Tag values will not be available. If they are required, you'll need to re-assign them as needed if they are null.

public virtual bool AllowMultipleLinks

Return a bool indicating whether the Publishing Service should allow multiple WL8 Strategies to link to the same Remote Strategy. For example, WealthSignals returns false here since each WealthSignals Strategy you create can link to only one WL8 Strategy. But WealthSim returns true, because you can link any number of WL8 Strategies to your single WealthSim account.

Getting Current Equity and Positions

public abstract (double, double) GetEquityAndCash(RemoteStrategyInfo rsi)

Override this method to return the current account equity and cash values from the publishing service, for the indicated Remote Strategy.

public abstract List<PositionPayload> GetOpenPositions(RemoteStrategyInfo rsi)

Override this method to return a list of open positions that are held at the publishing service, for the indicated Remote Strategy. The PositionPayload lightweight class contains these properties:

• PositionType (Long or Short)
• Symbol
• Quantity (double)
• EntryDate

Publishing Signals

public virtual bool CanPublishSignals

Return a boolean value indicating if Signal publishing is currently allowed. The default implementation returns true if the US stock market is currently closed.

public abstract OrderSubmissionPayload SubmitSignals(RemoteStrategyInfo rsi, List<OrderPayload> signals)

Override this method to publish a list of Signals to the publishing service, for the indicated Remote Strategy. The signals are represented by a List of OrderPayload instances. The OrderPayload lightweight class contains the following properties:

• TransactionType (Buy, Sell, Short, Cover)
• Quantity (double)
• Symbol
• OrderType (Market, Limit, Stop)
• OrderPrice (double)
• Weight (double) - transaction weight, higher values = higher priority

The method returns an instance of the OrderSubmissionPayload lightweight class with the following properties:

• OrdersSubmitted (int) - count of the number of Signals successfully published
• InfoMsg
• ErrorMsg - assigning a value to this string indicates an error

Publishing Backtest Results

public virtual bool CanPublishBacktestData(RemoteStrategyInfo rsi)

Some signal publishing services (notably WealthSignals) allow you to publish Strategy backtest results. If the service you are implementing supports backtest data upload, override this property to retutn true if the facility is available for the specified Remote Strategy.

public virtual void PublishBacktestData(RemoteStrategyInfo rsi, Backtester bt)

Override this method to implement the actual publishing of backtest data for the specified Remote Strategy. The Backtester instance passed in bt contains all available backtest performance metrics, including an EquityCurve TimeSeries, and a dynamic Metrics property that allows access to all ScoreCard metrics. See the Backtester class documentation for details.