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I love doing online stock trading in my free time. Because I spend most of the day at my job I cannot do much of it. So, I'm thinking of making a software that will automatically place trades for me based on the trading strategy that I created. The trading platform that my broker provided me is java and html5 based and I access it with a web browser. My broker does not provide API for automated trading. I have understanding of some basic Javascript and Python programming. So, in order to make my algo trading software I need to do some reverse engineering. Don't know java (no time to learn also) and don't have enough money for hiring a programmer. Is there anyway I can reverse engineer a java applet using Python/Javascript? If I can, what else I need to learn about reverse engineering, as I know only basic python and JS.

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    I would be very careful with using an undocumented, reverse-engineered API for trading; changes to the API/network protocol won't be announced, and the result might prove quite costly.
    – Guntram Blohm
    Apr 29, 2015 at 13:40

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If I understand well, you would like to reverse a Java applet in order to plug your own tool on a specific API (which is incidentally a trading platform).

I do not know why you are speaking about Javascript/Python... If you are reversing a Java application, then you need to know about Java applications... There is no escape from reality, unfortunately.

Anyway, what you need to use is a Java Decompiler in order to recover as much possible from the *.class files you got from the application you want to understand. There are several Java Decompilers that you can find, here is a small list (from the most featured to the least):

You can find more information by looking to this similar question on SO.

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If its web based, you may not have to reverse the Java app.

Have you tried tools like Fiddler - http://www.telerik.com/fiddler - to capture web traffic that occurs when you execute a trade?

You could figure out what parts of the API the browser is actually calling when certain things are executed by capturing that in Fiddler.

You could then write a program in python to act as you in the browser.

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