Trading Bot

My Personal History with Trading

Having gone to high school in Stuyvesant, it was only a brisk 15 minute walk away from Wall Street. And I’ve been fascinated in the financial markets since then. A close friend of mine at the time invited me to join an afterschool club that was run by a junior with a multi-million net worth made from trading options. The vice president was his good friend with a net worth of six figures. And you had several other of their circle of friends coming up and making a couple hundred to a couple thousand per month in a variety of markets. 

The vast majority of my senior year in high school was spent learning, experimenting, crafting, and honing my familiarity of navigating the financial markets. I would read books and scour forums to soak up this new world. I would experiment with different markets, various styles of trading, time intervals, screen setups, and combinations of indicators. Later, I started to converge on my own trading style. I preferred swing trading futures and forex with an average holding period of 20 days. Day trading was too stressful for me. 

My good friend was into options, and he was pretty good at it. Before graduating high school, he was presented the chance to cooperate with Goldman Sachs. Later when I visited him in his college dorm, he was working on coding(Python) and building an algorithm with a Goldman Sachs team. He dropped out his second year and later got into network security. He’s wiped his entire digital footprint off the net and he’s basically a ghost now. But I don’t worry about him. Last time I heard he moved to Texas with his girlfriend and he told me he was proposing to her because he nearly died from Covid.

Why I Left Trading

I still remember the pivotal moment I left the digital trading floor. I was on the NZD/USD looking to buy the pullback from a major support line that could potentially end up quadrupling my account. All my prerequisites and rules were satisfied on my checklist and I leveraged in hard. The price took a nosedive and blew right through the major support line. I was negative 5 digits. The roller coaster ride of emotions ended when the price retraced and came up back at the level of breakeven. I thought I saw a glimmer of hope. Then, the price came down again to where it wiped me out with 0 dollars in the account. I couldn’t take it anymore and called it quits, packed my bags, and joined the army. That was the end of my ‘American Dream’.  At the time, I had a day job so although I was swing trading around 5~10 days, I couldn’t react to the sudden seesaw price action. Fate would have it later when I went back to check, my calculations were correct and the price would eventually reach new highs. 

Lessons Learned

I learned many valuable lessons during those years. I have pages upon pages of notes of how to trade. The wealth of knowledge that has been accumulated over the years is definitely very valuable to me, especially during these amazing AI emergence turbulent times. 

The most important thing that I learned was that trading can be a very lucrative path if one can eliminate the human emotions involved. Trading by nature is systematic, as such eliminating emotions or “letting the trade play out” is critical for the success of any trading strategy. 

By systemically and statistically making calculated bets, this becomes a lot like professional poker but even better. Many outsiders dismiss trading as another gambling pastime, but it would be wise to stop and consider the world of professional trading. Are you to say that the best and brightest people in mathematics, statistics, and coding in the world have flocked to Wall Street(and every major financial hub akin to it), and the thousands of hedge fund companies around the world are goofing around and just gambling? 

Now More Than Ever

There has been an explosion of up and coming YouTubers who have made a living being a professional trader all in the comfort of their bedrooms in the past few years. Social trading platforms such as El Toro and TradingView have definitely helped spread easy accessibility to free information. Viewers can follow along in live time by watching streamers place live bets on their channels. Now more than ever, the general populace has access to more paths to financial freedom and digital nomad lifestyles. 

Why I Failed my First Trading Bot

When I was first starting out building my first IT outsourcing company, I was deeply infatuated with trading for the second time in my life. I was in the army and when you make measly peanuts while your whole life is revolving around a very limited environment with braindead colleagues and an entire lack of any sort of mental stimulation, you start to find other ways to stimulate your brain. For me, that was starting a company while studying trading and coding. 

With our first few profits, I successfully persuaded my then partners to invest some of it into building a trading bot. We found someone that I’ve been following on YouTube for some time and the results were very promising. The freelancer helped us set up everything, but then I had lost all support from my partners, and I never fully realized my dreams for a trading bot. That should’ve been a red flag for me with my partners, but I was too young and inexperienced at the time. In retrospect, it was a huge major red flag. What kind of person would say no to a trading bot that showed great promise? 

Using a trading bot to manage all your trades is the next step in one’s path to becoming an independent trader. The overwhelming issue with trading all stems from human emotion: stress, greed, pride, basically the seven deadly sins and then some. Although it doesn’t solve all issues of trading, it eliminates at least 80% of it. 

What Makes a Great Project?

If you’ve been following our content, you will also know that we at FFF just love digital automation. Let’s briefly go over the factors that make a trading bot one of the best options for financial freedom and becoming a professional digital nomad.

1. Digital
2. Automatic
3. Scalable
4. Zero marketing
5. Zero employees
6. Make money day 1
7. (potentially) Huge profits
8. Time resistant(not a fad)
9. Market growth
10. Low entry barrier 

You can’t get any better than these factors. It’s a 10/10 project in our books. After reviewing literally thousands of project bids, I can tell you with great confidence that this kind of project is extremely rare to find.

Consider All the Different Financial Markets

There are a vast range of markets to trade from. It all depends on your trading style. There is no need to follow the trend and look into trading crypto from the get go. Just in the same way you would diversify your portfolio, you would do the same with trading, especially since it’s a bot, so you don’t have to be limited from not knowing the “pulse” and distinct personality of a specific market in order to trade it. Crypto definitely has its perks with huge volatility, huge leverages, and an always-open market. Futures can provide a similar feeling with high leverages and currency pairs open 24/7. Options can be an extremely lucrative market if one can be adept with the Greek letters. Stocks are a personal disinterest but dividend payouts could be a delicious habit getting used to.

When we consider the evolution of financial instruments, we really have come to a remarkable stage. From stock ticker tape to futures to options to forex and now crypto. Each new instrument complementing the previous limitations. It is an exciting notion to imagine what the next major financial instrument will transform into.

From our research and backtesting, we’ve come to the definitive conclusion that all strategies and algorithms must be confined within their respective markets for the best results. The same strategy optimized for crypto DO NOT work on other financial markets and vice versa. Which also means, just because you back-tested your algo on a particular market does not mean it’s not a killer algo on some other market. So please try them all! 

Referencing all available resources we’ve been able to develop multiple algos that have been backtested for solid profits. Actual development and set up along with maintenance have become amazingly simpler since preCovid. Covid made us stay home, but technology was still rushing at breakneck speed towards the Singularity(The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization.).

The What Behind Our Bot

In the initial stages of ideation, we faced a series of pivotal questions that would shape our trading bot. Questions like: 

• Which financial markets? 
• What types of strategies?
• What types of market conditions?
• What kinds of indicators?
• What business model?
• What growth stages?
• What about risk management?

Our primary goal was to create a cost-effective, reliable, and fully automated trading solution. We wanted to prove that with the right tools and mindset, anyone could achieve consistent trading success without the hassle and stress of manual trading.

The overarching theme for this project was to eliminate human error and emotion from the trading process. We aimed to build a bot that operates around the clock, leveraging sophisticated algorithms to make precise trading decisions. Just like in e-commerce, where choosing the right platform can make or break your business, in trading, the right tools are crucial.

Key Features of Our Completely Developed Trading Bot

• Advanced Algorithms: Our bot uses state-of-the-art algorithms to analyze market data and execute trades. Imagine having a team of expert traders working for you 24/7.
• Fully Automatic: Once set up, the bot runs independently, executing trades without any manual intervention. Think of it as a self-driving car for your trading portfolio.
• Autonomous Trading: Our bot is designed to adapt to various market conditions, ensuring optimal performance even in volatile environments.

Currently we are taking it one step at a time. Before jumping to fully automatic and autonomous, we figured having a small period of manual live trading would be an enormously beneficial step for the solid foundation of a fully automated trading bot. This step will ensure quality control and provide valuable insight for further optimization and in-depth data such as calculating api calls and server costs.

The funny thing is that each of our team members are interested in different markets when it comes to trading. This worked out perfectly for us to be able to naturally diversify ourselves into monitoring the various trading opportunities in the futures, crypto, and stock markets. Bonds and options are boring, so we’ll put those on the backburner for now and come back to those when we’re bored. For those who haven’t married to a particular market yet, we strongly recommend you to court the three markets we are observing before ‘putting a ring on it’. Each market has its own particulars and perks. Trading also becomes a personal journey of getting to know one’s self as you hone in on the different variations of trading. 

Developmental Roadmap

Building our trading bot has been a journey filled with learning and innovation. Here’s a glimpse of our roadmap:

1. Phase 1: Develop core algorithms and establish the software infrastructure. Go live.
2. Phase 2: Expand and refine algorithms to handle more market scenarios. Incorporate in a tax haven country.
3. Future Phases: Integrate AI technologies, continually adapt to market changes, and prepare for major events like regulatory updates, significant market shifts, or geopolitical influences. Inject 3rd party capital in the form of commercialization or private equity investors.

Lessons Learned

Creating a trading bot is both an art and a science. Here are some insights from our journey:

1. Algorithm Development: Simplicity is king. Too many cooks ruin the soup, and too many indicators ruin the algorithm. 
2. Market Adaptation: No such thing as one-size-fits-all algo. Tailor algorithms and confine them to specific markets and its corresponding conditions and trends.
3. Innate nature: Working on this project was immensely satisfying. The fact that it tickled my fancy of coding, AI, trading, and potential capital gains was exhilarating. Combined with the fact that there was no need to consider post-launch marketing or user/customer acquisition made it stress-free. If no one works with us, we really don’t care because we’d still be earning revenue on a daily basis.

The Why Behind Our Bot

Why did we embark on this project? Because manual trading is inefficient and error-prone. It demands constant attention and emotional fortitude, which most traders struggle with. Our automated solution offers consistent results, free from human error and emotional decision-making. The crypto and futures markets’ unique attributes—constant activity and global reach—make it the ideal playground for our bot.

Our Current Status and Invitation

Right now, we’re in the exciting phase of refining our algorithms and preparing for commercialization. We’ve backtested our strategies and are seeing promising results.

If you’re intrigued by what we’re doing, we’d love to hear from you. Whether you’re interested in investing in our project or want us to manage your funds, we’re open to collaboration. But hurry—our capacity is limited, and we’re very selective about our partners.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to fine-tune our bot and prepare for its official launch. Exciting times ahead!

The Path Forward

We’re committed to revolutionizing the trading landscape, one algorithm at a time. This journey is just beginning, and we invite you to join us. Let’s transform trading together, leveraging the power of automation and AI to achieve unprecedented success.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. Here’s to a future of stress-free, profitable trading!