Have any of you made trading bots? If you put in a few hours a week is it worth it to try and make one? Even if it’s not beating the market, do you think its a valuable experience? Any tips? Also any tips on going from tech software dev to trading firm software dev?
Remember to include circuit breakers so logic bugs don’t cause a huge loss
I have a trading bot running in production which is written with Python and IBKR on the ES futures right now. It is worth it but it required ALOT of domain knowledge about trading as well which I had to learn. If you are just picking up coding it will be overwhelming for you but you will learn alot if you keep at it
How did you learn the domain knowledge for trading?
Google and trial and error
Yes, I've made trading bots. Yes, it's worth it. Tips: Don't waste time with exchanges that only offer REST api. Look for exchanges that support websocket feeds for reading data and for placing trades. Also, read up on maker vs taker strategies and decide which approach you want to try.
TD’s satisfies all that yeah? Or do you do direct market access
Idk about TD actually, I was just talking about crypto
What soft do you use guys?
Do you normally trade stocks or complex mixed options’ strategies?
Careful of your tax implications with those tiny transactions and gainloss calculations. Been there, done that and finally made tax software 😃
I think its a valuable experience. Programmers and the general public overestimate the level of software and resources necessary to do this. Access to the data streams were the only gatekeeping factor over the last two decades ($12,000/mo, antiquated non standard APIs, uncompetitive nonexistent service level agreements) while this was masqueraded as needing an army of “genius quants”. But the competition from crypto exchanges offering free REST APIs and some FIX has raised customer demand for the same from retail securities exchanges, so with TD Ameritrade now having a free RESTful API as well, building stuff to trade traditional markets has a much lower barrier of entry too.
Would this be worth a non coder exploring as a first time project? Or is it too complex?
Probably too complex. I think you could do your main case pretty easily “find stock, send order” but anything more intelligent like monitoring a position or stock prices, heck even the authentication would probably be too ambitious for a non-coder. Time consuming for coders too