I often wonder about the philosophy of making a trading bot. On one hand, you think that maybe by throwing enough brain power at the problem you might be able to crack the magical nut and print money from thin air. On the other hand, you know that millions of other incredibly talented and skilled people are also working on the same problem, and no one has really had much success such as to be notable.
On the third hand, it seems like common practice to use algorithms on Wall Street and in hedge funds, with many people claiming that the entire stock market is actually just 90%+ bot activity. So clearly it's possible to make money with bots, right? Otherwise nobody important would keep using them? I know that response time also matters with big firms spending billions of dollars just to be centimeters closer to the NYSE. But you can't just get rich from being faster than the next guy, can you? Don't you still have to be able to make all the right moves with the data coming in?
Maybe the secret trick is to become a hedge fund first, and then figure out how to make money later.