[backtestingmofo]

I’ve been writing algorithmic trading software and back testers as a hobby for a couple years now, and what surprises me most is how it is possible to have decent profits without mad financial skills. The trick is good quality data and a couple spare hours a week! A rooky mistake I have made is losing too many days trying to hack myself a good source of data, so I can only recommend paying a few bucks for a reliable one. You can definitely have a good time (while making money) with basic swing trading algorithms and a bunch of historical end of day data like https://www.gourgane.io

[nasir]

I've had a similar problem to find proper data for cryptocurrencies while I was writing my trading tool. It was quite some work to set up a proper infrastructure to get the data. Though eventually I turned that into a full service. You can check it out on https://coinograph.io

[backtestingmofo]

Oh nice! I will give this a try

[tudelo]

Is there any way you can give more details on...

Where you trade? What sort of trades? How much capital to start doing something like this?

[backtestingmofo]

I have been using Questrade for a while (I’m from Canada) but they are closing their API so I will have to switch to Interactive Broker...

My algorithms are mainly swing/long term, so making a few trades a month. I like to trade and back test ETFs like SPY and SPXL since they have high volumes and are more easy to « predict ».

I started with 10k and it didn’t feel risky at all since it was post 2009 :)

[zombieprocess]

Any resources on learning swing/long term algorithms that you mentioned?

[backtestingmofo]

I'm a software engineer and I developed trading algorithms just by playing around and visualizing data. Once you have historical data, technical indicators and a simple back tester, you can test some trading strategies and get feedback quickly. Graphing the output of your tests to analyze the annual return over time also helps a lot to design algorithms.

I have limited financial knowledge but I would recommend reading about technical analysis and technical indicators (This one is short and sweet https://www.investopedia.com/university/technical/) just so you can grasp the basics.