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Niraj Kumar
Niraj Kumar

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Building an Automated Equity Stock Trader - 1

I had always wanted to learn about Share Market and Stock Trading, but kept on procrastinating. Then last year I read some articles on Financial Freedom, and the eagerness to better my finances rose again. But, my heart was never into Finance, or anything related to money. I am a programmer and I love programming so much so that I had practically ignored everything else - social life, money management, time management. Heck, sometimes I think, I get paid to do things I love and I might have done my work for a small bag of peanuts, except pizzas cost more.

Since, I am acutely aware of my procrastination issue, I decided to take a new year resolution to get better at financial matters, learn more about it and strive for financial freedom. I wanted to have a system where my money will keep growing even when I sleep.

So, I started learning about share market, by doing active trading and reading about it whenever I could find find time.

Pretty soon, I got hooked. Made some money, and lost more than I made. After a while, I realized these -

  • I was wasting time and money on penny stocks (which are mostly garbage) with the hope that with given enough time one of these will become multibagger
  • I have fat fingers (Bungled many trades)
  • Market is ruled by fast, disciplined, well informed, and well experienced traders
  • Technical Information about stocks are very important
  • It's better to do swing trading and keep rotating money to get better yield
  • I have poor memory, I cannot remember trades, stocks and their prices
  • I am poor at managing my portfolio
  • I am super lazy
  • I get scared easily
  • I take unnecessary unplanned risks

I had been approached by many portfolio management service providers, but I refused to accept their services - the reason being - I want to learn the system to become better at this. I want to build my own capability.

I had always wanted an automated system which could recommend me which stocks to buy/sell and give me alerts at the right time. Perhaps later, the system can do trading on its own. Trading can be learned, and it can be taught. Success depends on practice, and with better planning, better coding, better persistence. If I can build a system which will do my job for me - Earn me money while I sleep, then that would be an amazing achievement.

I am sure, there are many machines, such systems out there and I could use their service instead of trying to build my own. But, I had always been a doer, I want to use this opportunity to learn more and more. I am using this journey to learn new languages, new technologies - AI/ML, Big Data, Data Science, Algorithmic Trading, Read and Understand Financial Data, Realtime Data Processing. So many things to learn and do, it's all exciting.

Just recently I had completed the first step on this journey - Created a program to help me analyze my old trades and notify me of falling prices. It's a very important first step, and I will keep writing more and more about my journey.

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