Algorithmic Trading 101

Learn to Build a Trading Bot to
Automate Your Investments 🔥

Learn Python and Build Investment/Trading Algorithmic Strategies to Invest in the Financial Markets.

No prior experience needed, only a computer. However, do not sign up if you are looking for sure-fire ways to make money. This is NOT a learn to make money course.

“Quantitative investing based on computer formulas and trading by machines directly are leaving the traditional stock picker in the dust and now dominating the equity markets” – JP Morgan
 

Why Should You Join This Course?

Investing is the tried and proven path in building wealth regardless of occupation. Whether you make $1,000 or $30,000 a month, investing for the long term can* amplify your net-worth. Dollar cost averaging is a proven investment strategy in building long term wealth*. This course teaches you basic programming through building a trading bot to give you an even greater edge to succeed in the financial markets*.

Never coded before? Worry not! The course is broken down into small chunks of step-by-step video tutorials, explaining what, why and how to get you started. You can pause and replay tutorials at your own pace.

This course serves as an initial experience to building far more complex and potentially profitable trading bots. But do not look down at dollar cost averaging your investments! Click here to find out how much you would have made by dollar cost averaging Apple stocks if you started 5 years ago

We made this course as affordable as possible for anyone to invest into their future. You gain lifetime access and lifetime updates to the course.

Apart from automating your own trading/investment strategies, you will also learn basic programming. Ultimately, you will discover why people say learning to code is important and you will figure out why programming is so powerful. This knowledge could ultimately open up opportunities you could never have imagined!

* We will through some fundamental ideas in investing. However, this course is more about teaching you to write code and automate your investments and not about teaching you how to develop investment strategies or spot trends. As such, this is definitely not a get-rich-quick course. Do not sign up if you are looking for sure-fire ways to make money.
* Dollar cost averaging is not a strategy we invented, it is a tried and proven strategy and generally accepted by the investment community. Your risk is dependent on the underlying asset you have chosen to invest in. You can read more about it on Investopedia – Dollar Cost Averaging.

Who Is NEXT Academy?

NEXT Academy has trained many people from different backgrounds to become coders.
E.g. journalists, accountants, engineers, DJs, waiters, students and more. Here’s what they say.

Emika Ijuin

From engineer to software developer

Coming to NEXT Academy bootcamp really helped me tremendously. It increased my speed of learning, and it’s so exciting that I can learn together with like-minded people from all over the world!

Fung Wei Tan Tai

From Project Manager to CTO of GoGet

The coding bootcamp taught me how to think like a developer. I am now able to better manage my team and plan our technology roadmap for the future, I now have many mentors and friends to pull on when I am in need of tech advice.

Jordan Rao

Co-founder of Nucleus Solutions

I had an exceptional journey from being interested in programming to actually being able to program. The journey was filled with challenges but it was definitely worth it.

Matt Cross

From Car Industry to Tech

It was difficult at first coming in with very little knowledge coming into the bootcamp, and at the pace of which the bootcamp moves you HAVE to give 150% of your effort if not you are going to fall behind.

Bintang Tobing

From graphic designer to frontend web developer

“Before I enrolled here at NEXT, I’ve joined a few other bootcamps before. But, the difference between NEXT Academy and them is so prominent. NEXT Academy prioritized hands-on practice, while a lot of other bootcamps teach more on theories.”

Abel Senwelo

Web Developer Upskilled with React JS

I was really drawn to NEXT Academy because it teaches React JS, which is very much in-demand in the industry right now. No other bootcamps taught this so it was a great opportunity for me.

Are You Ready To Pick Up A New Skill?

And learn how you can start coding & get into a tech career.

A trading bot is using a program/ computer to execute trading strategies on the exchanges instead of relying on humans.

Trading bots vs Humans

Investment and trading requires discipline and the ability to not succumb to your emotions. Sometimes traders prefer trading bots because bots are not victims to their emotions and it will religiously follow the logical thought process which the traders themselves have inputted.

Beyond that, trading bots can function and monitor the market 24/7 while a human would not be able to do so.Furthermore, speed of execution is crucial in high frequency trading which happens in <1 second. A human would not be able to perform as efficiently as a trading bot.

Automating Trading Across Different Financial Instruments

There are many bots out there that can automate your trading, be it day trading, forex trading, cryptocurrency trading and stock trading. As long as the trading platform has APIs that allow you to write your trading program and connect to the exchanges, you are able to execute them your bot. Stocks, cryptocurrency, forex, ETFs are just the financial instruments you want to buy or sell with.

You can write a Dollar Cost Averaging strategy trading bot and execute this strategy across ALL the assets; or you can choose to tweak your trading bots according to the volatility of the financial assets. For example, cryptocurrencies are a lot more volatile than Dow Jones or S&P500.

  • Interactive Brokers/ TD Ameritrade are platforms that easily allow you to plug in your trading bot to trade across stocks, options, ETFs and many more financial instruments.

  • Binance/ Bitmex for example, is purely for cryptocurrencies and complex instruments surrounding crypto.

Different types of Trading Strategies Bots

Keep in mind that there are different types of trading bots, for example:

  • Value investing bots – e.g. only trade when there is a discount or premium on stocks

  • Quant trading bots – e.g. look into Moving Averages, order books, RSI etc. to determine entry and exit points

  • Market maker bots – e.g. high frequency trading that involve placing a limit order to sell (or offer) or a buy limit order (or bid) in order to earn the bid-ask spread.

  • Dollar Cost Averaging bots – e.g. it invests an equal amount in intervals regardless of the price of the asset.

Trading bots is literally asking the computer to make the trade for you. If you want the computer to make any form of trades for you, you would need to code out the instructions to the computer.

There are 3 components that is needed here:
1. Domain knowledge and strategy
2. Coding knowledge & access to finance libraries
3. API knowledge to connect your bot & the exchange

Domain knowledge and strategy

You need to have finance domain knowledge and a strategy in place. The computer is only executing your commands and your strategies.

Coding knowledge & access to finance libraries

After having your strategies in place, you now need to turn your strategies into code for the computer to run. Not just that, you should know how to take advantage of the finance libraries from a particular coding language.

In this case, Python programming has one of the most extensive finance libraries which you can look into (no need to write those mathematical formulas from scratch, yay!).

API knowledge to connect your bot & the exchange

You need to know how to connect your bot with the exchange you want to operate on. The exchange would have its own API protocols which you need to adhere to before the connection can be made. Learn to read the documentation and code out the “bridge” to connect both your bot and the exchange. Different exchanges would have slightly different API protocols.

Here you can learn Python and execute your first trading bot on an exchange.

Your trading bot is as good as your own trading strategy. When you write a bot, you are writing a version of yourself into the computer. If your trading strategy has been working so far for you, your bot should reflect your performance as well.

If you can make money or not, is all up to your own strategies. A trading bot is basically a program that acts and trades like you, but more efficiently and less emotionally.

One of the low risk strategy that investors is Dollar cost averaging which our course is building.

This requires robust testing on your side to ensure that the bot is able to execute the way you want it to be regardless of the conditions of the market.

You have to keep in mind what “error” means, there are 3 questions:
1. Strategy error
2. Code error
3. Unexpected market condition

strategy error means that your strategy is flawed in the first place and the computer is only executing your flawed strategy. A code error means that the interpretation of the strategy into code has mistakes, thus causing the strategy to not be executed properly. Unexpected market condition means that there are unforeseen market changes which you didn’t think of and thus did not input it as an extreme condition in your bot.

Yes it is. In fact, exchanges open up their API access to encourage trading bots to trade. The reason is simple, an exchange needs to be active and liquid. “Liquidity” means a high volume of activity in a market.

No investors would want to be in an illiquid market because that would mean they can’t buy-sell easily. Thus, trading bots help with creating activity in the market.

There is no such thing as the “best” trading bot, it all depends on the strategy. These days, people are looking towards Artificial Intelligence to build their bots. They would still need to train the bots on understanding human behaviours and market movements.

There are firms that use A.I. to understand the sentiment of the market as well as the welfare of the world. The market does not only involve the investors in the market but the economical, the political sentiments of the world. Some companies are building A.I. bots to extract these information to assist decision making. For example:

  • The changes of weather for example could greatly reduce crop yield, and thus you can predict that certain commodities in the market would shoot up.

  • The oil war between OPEC and any other countries would usually cause a drastic increase of oil supply in the market, thus causing oil prices to tank world wide.

There is no such thing as the “best” trading bot. It just depends on your strategy and the variables you take into account. To date, there are currently no prominent A.I. bot that have consistently beat the market.

It depends how complex it is, the asking price of the coder OR if you know how to code.

High-frequency trading bots would require highly experienced coders. High-frequency trading (HFT) firms pay top dollars for these talents.

If you know how to code, you can always start off with your own strategies and build it up from there. You can start your first step by learning how to write your algo trading bot with us.

If you are a trader and you want to write your first algo trading bot, we would propose to start off with a single strategy bot. You should first get used to how trading bots can help you before you fully deep dive into a more complex bot.

High-frequency trading bots would require highly experienced coders. High-frequency trading (HFT) firms pay top dollars for these talents.

You can check out our Dollar Cost Averaging Trading Bot class.

  • You will learn Python programming

  • You will Write the logic statements behind the Dollar Cost Averaging strategy Python programming

  • Connect to the exchanges through the API

  • Deploy your trading bot and see it go LIVE!