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Comment by dookahku | Hacker News Reader

So how does a mid-level software engineer get into trading? I do paper trading on my own for fun but I'd like to make it a career.

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Depends on what you mean. If you're looking at tech trading of stocks from home, quantopian is a great place to start. wallstreetoasis forums for a traditional roles for juniors and people trying to get in.

And just remember its a shrinking area. There are lots of traditional traders that have been laid off and are looking for work.

Is quantopian a viable platform or are you just going to food for the bigger fish in the pond?

Personally, i am working on building a cryptocurrency trading platform, because the API's are easily accessible - but the markets entirely different in behavior. Still, rolling my own implementations of technical indicators has been pretty insightful, and backtesting has shown whats worked and what hasn't in given market conditions.

but i realize you're probably talking about more traditional markets like FOREX

What are you using to backtest? Data you gathered yourself?

Hardest part with backtesting in my experience has been trying to simulate successful buy/sell orders and the fees.

You can query Bittrex for some data, or you can find some data and a script from here https://github.com/gcarq/freqtrade/tree/master/freqtrade/tes...

Couldn't you bake the fee into the application logic e.g. https://github.com/gcarq/freqtrade/blob/master/freqtrade/mai...

> Couldn't you bake the fee into the application logic

You can (and I do as well) - although some proprietary bots have had notable problems with figuring them out.

Fee isn't limited to what you're paying the exchange, you have to take into account slippage - the price you use in your backtests is NOT the price you could actually realistically buy at because as soon as you buy, you move the price (especially in size).

Strictly speaking, you should be incorporating level 2 order book data to properly gauge fees and simulate real world profits from your backtests.

poloniex has historical data you can use. I trade on bittrex, but their data doesn't go back very far - enough to do calculations in the now, but not nearly enough to backtest against.

Same way you get into any industry. Get a job at a place that trades.

Like any industry it’s best if you have contacts there to get you past the HR gauntlet but even if not they advertise jobs like anywhere else.

I am also interested in the answer to this question.

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