If you want to be a quant, write your own code

code a trading bot I said, It’ll be easy I said

I wasn’t incorrect. It’s just that people really go out of their way to tell you that the open source solutions available work.

I didn’t start out trying to code my own solution, trust me on that. I evaluated several platforms for automated trading, and none of them had the specific indicator I wanted to use. Which is strange, given the indicator is very simple. I really want it to be a conspiracy. The indicator isn’t that complicated. There were many requests for it on prominent bot trading platforms, but the companies refused to implement it siting reasons like ‘its not in the open source library we use’.

So in the end, the companies taking money from users are just using the same broken open source software anyone else tries to use anyway.

It’s probably my naivety

Prior to this year most of my development projects were custom for red team hacks, all cobbled together in the heat of trying to extract some precious data from the innards of some bloated prod environment and route it through some obscure tunnel so it wouldn’t be seen. The code was creative and it got the job done, but it sure wasn’t was I envision when I think of ‘software engineering’.

Although there was that one time I wrote malware in java. Malware is really just software the user gets, worry free. It has to be extremely reliable, robust, and self-diagnostic because the user won’t try to fix it if it stops running.

So my experience using open source repos to actually build code that will reliably and repeatedly do the thing for hopefully me and anyone else who uses it is minimal.

I’m extremely happy with my infrastructure and its reliability and security. I’m just finding that a lot of the libaries I’m using have to be fixed up before I use them.

This isn’t my first rodeo

2018 was the last crypto hype train. I spend a lot of time trading and learning TA at the time. Probably not good TA, but I made profits. I’d like to trade crypto again sometime soon. But I’m sticking to the real stonks for the time being.