Would you pay to be able to build your own trading bot (automated system)?
I'm curious as to how much you'd be willing to pay, if at all, for a platform that allows you to automate your trading process.
I takes me about 40 hours to do proper DD on a company. It depends if I know the sector well, if not then even more. The actual trade is just hitting the sell/buy button.
That's once in a month.
I don't think I could ever automate the DD process.
You can come up with good AI and amazing algos but at the end of the day, a doctor knows more about the ill person just by looking at him/her for a few seconds, I feel like it's the same with trading/investing.
If I automate the valuation, I lose the connection to a company and its numbers. Another example would be insider transactions, there is a difference how you evaluate insider trading, it depends on the company and its market cap, the sector, and the management.
I don't even know how I could ever come up with good indicators for those issues.
Now there are also people who use TA, that's your clientele.
If someone created a platform like this with its own scripting language and REST api it would be like nothing available today.
Here are the realities of trading algorithms and trading automation:
1. Approximately no one trades competently - let alone profitably - outside of a trading firm. With very few exceptions the process of designing, implementing, testing, deploying, monitoring and improving trading algorithms is not a feasible job for a single person. This is aside from the problem of data acquisition, engineering and processing. There are people who profitably trade on their own, but they're typically veterans of a trading firm looking to grab a larger piece of the PnL on their own book. I don't know why there is this persistent belief that a lone individual is going to be automating trading competently - in the past I've compared this to thinking you could singlehandedly develop and/or maintain half of DuckDuckGo.
2. The firms which automate most of their trading - and this is increasingly the default - know how to do it and know how to acquire the talent requisite for maintaining that core competency. They like to keep things in-house where possible. They are extraordinarily secretive and don't like depending on third party infrastructure or tooling unless it's absolutely necessary. You are probably not going to develop an ultra-sticky product like Bloomberg, Nanex or kdb. A third party dependency that inserts itself into the risk management, analysis or execution pipeline is a liability. Moreover the intense secrecy means you will have difficulty talking to, or hearing from, employees of actual firms.
3. This is an incredibly crowded space to try and enter. Many companies have popped up which market products to firms looking to automate some or all of their process. They're typically not very successful in this effort for two reasons. The first is what I already mentioned about secrecy among firms. But just as importantly it's very difficult to develop a reliable trading process by hand, let alone to automate it. The customers you want to work with are savvy and most of the existing products are crap, so you'd need to have a very strong product and a very compelling case for why yours is different and useful.
To put this all together for you: by asking this question on Hacker News you're strongly selecting for answers from people who almost certainly do not trade professionally. If they believe they are competently and effectively trading on their own without professional experience, it is most likely because they have vast unknown unknowns and a limited definition of what "automated trading" means (for example, they might think they're doing automated trading because they use the Interactive Brokers API instead of manually placing orders). You can target that kind of crowd, but if you do so you're entering the B2C cottage industry of (de facto) day trading education, not the B2B industry of trading itself. Unless you're attempting to build a fintech hypergrowth startup like Robinhood you really don't want to do this in a B2C capacity; then you're optimizing for customers who have both limited money and limited experience they could use to get any more money.
But you have to admit your skill is extraordinary, and I'm not talking about people like you in my earlier comment. I'm talking about most people, who cannot do the things that you can do. They probably come easily to you but you're just gifted with exceptional talent and work ethic. Most people can't trade profitably even with all the resources of a firm behind them; that you can do it while making all those other firms look silly is astounding and remarkable. So please don't feel as though I was downplaying your impressive accomplishments.
I have come across people who are almost as good as me as well. They don't work in finance, have no finance experience, but they beat the most of those brokerages and are self sufficient, and work from home without a boss.
Anyways, there are many people who are doing what I am doing, to think they are not is not well thought out. Everyone who claims only experts can win are just not doing themselves a favour and the person listening to them.
I.e. Ignore the noise and get to work. There is money to be made. Just open your eyes, there is money to be had.
Edit: deleted references to a throwaway account.
And for what it's worth, I don't doubt you at all. Like I said, I fully believe you are as incredible as you say. But not all of us can so easily obviate the work of entire firms staffed with hundreds of people employed to improve their trading results. You should count yourself lucky!
I believe that if your algorithms perform well enough, you can actually lease them out to investors.
Your algo is also tied to the quantopian API and data that they provide. I'm not sure what the effort would be like to port a Quantopian algo to a platform like Interactive Brokers.
1) I have an account with Questrade, I need to enter the same trades on Interactive Brokers once I enter on Questrade. Also, I have customers who want to follow my trades, so if they can hook in and buy and sell at the same time I do, based on the same account balances, it can work for me.
2) I have a system where I enter if the stock price is > X. I use conditional orders for this now, so it doesn't really need to be automated, however it would be nice and would save me time.
3) The exiting is not automated because it's based on market sentiment, however, I wouldn't want to insert my data into any system that can leak the data. I could go for something where I put in supports, and instead of placing a stop order, it monitors the stock to fall under a price, and then stop me out using a market order. The reason I need this is because I would rather not have my stops advertised to brokerages.
4) Monitor my profile and alert me when a stock moves 5%,10% using beeps. This would be read-only. Something I am looking to do already.
The biggest drawback, what happens if the system fails? Are you going to reimburse me? If I write my own code, it's my own fault. Trusting someone else's code is hard to do. Also, if something breaks, how fast will it be fixed?
In the end, what I am doing now is conditional orders with a trailing stop that I adjust accordingly.
In particular, note that this titan of industry advertises a monthly subscription service for options trading 1) with absolutely no technical or nuanced financial terminology, 2) using words like "play" to refer to trading, and 3) with wealth-centric hype videos from The Wolf of Wall Street and American Gangster.
Run, don't walk, from this person's advice.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/user/marketgodfather/comments/8vm9jt/...