How to use Excel and XBID-API to automate energy trading in Italy
Microsoft Excel is extensively used in energy trading. There are many reasons for that, especially for small and cohesive teams. Indeed, Excel makes it easy and affordable to build customizable data analysis tools.
So, what about using Excel also to interact with XBID? For example, accessing the order books and submitting orders?
You already probably know that it is possible to write complex software within Excel using VBA, i.e. visual basic for application. From VBA you can call the XBID-ITA API using the REST protocol. By design, any iteration with such API needs to be digitally signed to make sure the identity of the caller.
Accessing the digital signature can be a lot difficult to be performed within VBA. Indeed, it is a mess also from many other programming languages. Using digital signatures properly to ensure the authenticity and integrity of exchanged data require specialized tools and expertise usually outside many energy trading teams.
To overcome this gap, it is available XBID-API: the software solution to implement and simplify automatic trading on the Italian implementation of XBID.
The main features of this software are:
- automate the access to digital signature
- simplify the access to the LTS-API REST interface
- logging all the interactions
- sharing of a single digital signature among multiple users
For more information, you can have a look at this link https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/xbid-api-italian-market-luigi-poderico/
If you want further to know more about how to automate your business on XBID, feel free to email me at luigi.poderico@dedagroup.it
