Topic: Learning how to code in order to automate trading strategies, is it worth? - page 2. (Read 266 times)

Had same thoughts in 2019. My best decision ever. My first program ever made in python start to earn after 12 hours of coding. Build from 0 my own market making strategy. It was full of bugs and requires constant care but it give me a nice kink to continue to upgrade it because it was already earing. I was never as motivated to work as that days because every upgrade made my bot earn faster and made the algorithm need less attention. After few weeks it was running 24/7. 15 min daily was all i had to do to calibrate it to current market situation. The feeling that you wake up in the morning and see that your bot has made 20 profitable trades is amazing.

All you need is:
https://www.w3schools.com/python/

Exchange api documentation f.e biannce api:
https://www.binance.com/en/binance-api

If you dont know how to do something there are a lot of tutorials. just type "how to sort in python" "how to xx in python" and you will have dozens of tutorials.

You can also start with youtube python video. Something like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqtD5dpn9C8&ab_channel=ProgrammingwithMosh

It depends on your goal, there are a lot of programming languages that can achieve the same goals, even javascript programming I think you can automate trading just like communicating with other exchanges' APIs to execute some trades, you can do it on node.js I believe.
But yeah, pinescript programming is very advisable to learn when it comes to trading.

I agree with @pooya87, programming language is brain tasking and requires interest, before venturing into this field ask yourself how prepared and passionate are you about coding because if you don't find it interesting enough and have the passion for it, you will be bored in no time especially when the intention is just for trading purpose.
Perhaps you can find alternative options to automate trading strategies without needing to learn coding from scratch.

Only learn a programming language if you like coding otherwise if the only reason you are doing it is to write a script that automates some actions you want to take in the market you would be disappointed soon and give up that learning journey. There are already some trading bots available out there, some of them are even open source that you can use.

In any case, any modern programming language would work. Python that you mentioned is an easy language to learn. I personally went for C# since I had some background and the language specifics made more sense (strongly typed object oriented design). I wrote some stuff that helped me in some trading strategies (like arbitrage) a couple of years ago when I used to spend more time in the market.

Depending on what exchange you use, there are strategies with some where you can set a certain parameter such as when price >5% on the day and when volume is 5x the average to sell or buy. Nothing really complicated.

Keep in mind one thing. It’s easier and seems profitable when you are back testing but if you run it’s in real time your results might be different due to slippage and liquidity issues. You might not get the desired fills you want when in a backtest you would. Not perfect results.

If you know how to trade, you'll probably do well if you can automate it and make a strategy of it (including things like backtesting and finding uncertancies - eg when to trade differently based on volatility).

If you don't know how to trade, you might be out of your depth unless you have some strategies in mind you want to fine tune via back testing (but I think this is less reliable). Support and resistance programming might be the best sort of thing to program this way, as well as simple things like price alerts.

You'd probably find it useful familiarising yourself with markup languages too for how requests might be returned (such as HTML, XML and json but only a small one).

Basically, for learning purposes, learning to code or anything related to programming will be a good added knowledge to your vocabulary. It means it will surely be worth your time as it might possibly help you too in your chosen career in the future, not just for trading activity and related work. Learning to code is a bit tough and the ability to learn and understand all programming languages is not for everybody. That's the reason why work related to it was associated with a high salary, in most cases.

But if we talk about trading strategies, there's a chance that what you or your program can generate, might not be effective as the market is speculative. The said program though can give those possible scenarios that will happen and that's the time we can create a set of strategies for each of those given scenarios.

I think a usual trading bot is not designed to generate trading strategies but rather to execute an action in real time once a certain condition is met that is set by its users. Therefore, the trading strategy still came from the user and the bot just followed a command.

If you will able to make such a program that can automate some trading strategies and execute the best strategies based on its AI analysis, that is something a game-changer although since the market is speculative, a chance of losing is still possible.

Hey members.

I have been a trader for about 4 years, but lately I have been thinking much about learning how to code from scratch (Yep, I am those unlucky ones who did a course that didn't require any coding  )

I intended to use the knowledge gathered to make and automate some trading strategies and also understand better how to use some bots, but I am left to wonder if these whole new journey will be worth it?

Also, apart from pine script programming language that is specifically trading view, is Python the only other programming language I need to learn (No JavaScript and all those other programming languages)?