I am not a coder but I am convinced of trade automation
As a part of the Advent Calendar 2018, I want to share my personal experience how I became convinced of trade automation and algorithmic trading. I hope this can display a perspective from non-coders and traditional manual traders. (This is 12/2 post for Trading API Advent Calendar 2018)
By the way, I am CoFounder/CEO of Alpaca, so there are probably lots of subjectivities in this post with regards to trade automation, but I try to be as frank and personal as possible here.
I am not a coder
Firstly, I am not a coder. Actually, I have some experience writing C++ and HTML, but both of my programming experiences are from more than 15 years ago. Back in days, I built many websites for my college groups and seminars by copying and pasting HTML lines from other websites and googling googling.
After that, I did not really touch programming until I started trading Forex.
As most Forex day traders use, my go-to application was MetaTrader. I traded Forex here and there by looking at charts especially from London market open until NY market close. You may think that the Forex market is open 24 hours, and you are right. However, during those hours when London and NY hours are open, I had a less difficult time finding higher volatility and more consistency in price movement.
No more of staring computer monitors, please
Like as other manual day traders do, I got enough of chasing price movements by myself for long hours staring at computer monitors. Most of the times, it was very difficult to control myself, and I made many stupid mistakes not being able to follow rules that I was supposed to. These undisciplined actions usually lead to losing trades.
Even though I understood that I had to follow rules, it continued to be very difficult, and I kept finding myself between greed and fear deciding what to do, which I actually felt like a very natural human reaction.
This experience led me to believe that I nor any humans should not even try to control natural human reactions, but instead, we should automate the rules into self-running algorithms.
Forex trading and MetaTrader
In Forex trading, there was somewhat an ecosystem around MetaTrader where lots of users globally made businesses selling their knowhows and trading bots on the internet. Also, there were many blog sites that MetaTrader users post their diaries with the performance as well as some tips on how to program strategies in a MetaTrader proprietary language called mql. Some users also posted free scripts, which I copied and pasted and played around with.
Unfortunately, I experienced that Forex trading bots ecosystem was pretty unstructured back then. It is very difficult to figure out which I should trust or should not. Additionally, as an asset class, I was not able to find the long-term direction of how a specific currency should perform better than the others or even should go up at all.
Automation is good for people (I think)
I think that Alpaca can do this much better creating a community with very legitimate offerings.
In order for us to build this fully, we continue to need the community’s support. From my long and winding experience in trading, even as a non-coder and coming from the manual trading side, I am fully convinced that automation of trading and investing activities need to come for all of us.
Technology and services are offered by AlpacaDB, Inc. Brokerage services are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC (alpaca.markets), member FINRA/SIPC. Alpaca Securities LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of AlpacaDB, Inc.
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