Algorithmic Trading: A Practitioner’s Guide

Thing is, one will be hard pressed to find solid, relevant, detailed and current information about legitimately profitable trading strategy. Once a strategy becomes widely used, the 'market inefficiencies' being exploited cease to be readily available, so there is a strong incentive to keep a good strategy private. I vaguely remember reading about HFT firms obscuring their trading activity for this reason. Additionally you will find the online world absolutely saturated with the grifter types. So good info is hard to come by. Be prepared to learn at least the fundamentals of both trading and statistics, do lots of testing, and basically figure it out on your own because nobody successful (and smart) is sharing their reliable, profitable strategies (that doesn't mean you can't learn from them - just don't copy paste).

It is a very interesting domain though and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about it all and building mine.

Once you got that part setup, try to write a simple program that buys or sells an equity from the command line .

From their own you can start exploring trading algorithms. Some are pretty basic, like when the price crosses above a 200 DMA, then buy a stock as that usually signifies an upward run, while selling if the price falls below the 200DMA as that is bearish.

Then you can read some books on price action, fundamental or technical analysis and build your own algos.

HFT is, more or less... but algo trading in general can be as simple as executing strategies you would otherwise manually perform. I believe there's still enough alpha out there.

For (2), there are zero-fee brokers (e.g. those mentioned by downvoteme1 earlier) that you can use, so you don't have to keep feeding the broker.

I made a python framework to try to help with this: https://github.com/robswc/stratis

However, it became hard to maintain an opensource version. I would say its still not a bad way to get a head start (bias there, ofc)

I will say, its not something that can be done "on the side." I originally made a decent amount of $ by getting lucky in crypto. I figured I'd "just become a algo trader" and it was much more difficult than I could have imagined.

I actually _just_ started a series on how to build an equity trading system from scratch. I planned to put part 1 out later this week but eh, I'll post it now, it touches on it better than my comment here can :)

https://robswc.substack.com/p/building-an-equity-trading-sys...

* the post assumes you already have alpha (a profitable strategy)

> Has anyone done this successfully?

Regarding this, I actually originally talked a bit with the (now infamous) SBF of FTX about this. I originally wanted to join Alameda Research... but at the time, I didn't want to move across the world. For years I regretted that decision (not so much now, lol) I started my own firm though and I have made a decent amount of $. Truth be told though, knowing what I know now, I might have put more energy into a start up. I enjoy the challenges of algotrading but doing some consulting work, I think I enjoy "building" more than running statistical tests, cleaning data, etc etc.

To sum up this comment though, _if_ you had a profitable strategy and _if_ you built a system that could reliably execute trades, you certainly could be successful. It is very difficult though.