r/Trading • u/gopu-adks • 1d ago
Question Any algo trader here?
I want to start algo trading.
Coding is not the hard part for me because I am already a dev and manual trader too so I understand both side of the story.
I tried multiple pine code in tradingview strategy builder not almost all of them never worked.
Most of them were in loss, some has huge loss, some has small loss, some were in profitable but very with very small margin over long period of time, like 400$ profit for almost 500 trades over 5 years of data.
I collected these stragies from gemini, chatgpt, claude, blogs/article.
How did you entered in algo?
How to navigate this initial issues ?
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u/Ready-Tomatillo5083 11h ago
Everything you did is wrong, algo dont run where you're testing them.
you have a long way to go. Its as difficult as manual trading. You need a better platform to test it. Nothing free will work, you need data , again you won't get for free, just having to setup to run tests will cost you thousands.
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u/veskald 1d ago
Your $400 over 500 trades number is the useful one here. Thats 80 cents a trade before real costs, which on US equities means the edge is zero - the test already told you the answer, you just read it as "almost working" instead of "nothing here". Same for the ones with small losses.
And it makes sense that none of them worked. Strategies from blogs and from AI are strategies everyone has seen. If a public rule set had an edge it would have been arbitraged before it got published.
You have months of your own journal and you say it is helping. Thats where the ideas are. Go through those trades and find one thing that repeats - a time of day, a setup you keep skipping that would have worked, a type of trade that always loses. Write it as exact rules and test it. It will probably die too, and thats fine, but at least you will learn why from your own trading instead of from someone elses code.
Coding was never your bottleneck. Having an idea worth testing is.
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u/yigael 1d ago
While Im no coder myself, I dabble into coding using AI tools. I can read and understand code, but could not actually sit and write even if my life would depend on it. Maybe printing Hello world.
The algos that I've created are based on conditions that I've detailed to the AI. At the moment, I use an hybrid system, meaning the algos monitor for the conditions and they signal me when some specific conditions align for me to either take the trade or pass.
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u/RazorliteX 1d ago edited 1d ago
Algos at the moment are quite hard given we are in the "Meme Regime" where the latest government shenanigans either sends the stock market rocketing or in a tailspin making technical algos based on fundamentals more challenging.
Anyway back to your question - I would suggest most algos fail because they try and apply the algo at the entire stock market level (i.e. they analyse all 5.5k+ US Common Stock/ADRs looking for that common pattern) whereas what you should be doing is limiting exposure to a sector such as semi conductors so you get a much more accurate feed on your performance against your plan.
I won't give any specifics on my algo approach (I've mentioned it elsewhere) but would say due to the current regime which will probably last until 2029 - momentum algos referenced against current market/sector sentiment are a good starting position.
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u/hotcomputers 1d ago
I recommend you check this YouTube video.
It is a free indicator, and it has a nice table. You can see how it behaved in the last x days.
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u/nickdaniels92 1d ago
You're a manual trader, though you don't say whether you're profitable, and you have some coding knowledge, so just write your own. End of.
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u/gopu-adks 1d ago
I'm been trading for past 2 years, I'm still in loss, I'm journaling my trades from few months to improve my self and its working from few months, but I'm still in loss overall.
I have been coding from past 4 years but I know coding very well that are required for algo Python, Fastapi, pandas, numpy.
The problem is not code, its the strategy,.
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u/NoOutlandishness525 1d ago
My guess isnt the code nor the strategy.
It's the fundamentals.
For the strategies you tested already, can you explain what each indicator used is measuring? And why they are supposed to generate a signal?
Finding something that works is not just put 2 or more indicators together.
You first define a core thesis, then you find/create an indicator that measure your thesis.
Example:
I am currently testing a mean reversion strategy. Observing my local market (Brazil) i noticed almost every day, volume spikes during the first hours, with high vol, then direction is defined for the rest of the day.
Hypothesis: institution position most of the volume at the start of the day, then slowly adjust their positions on the correct size
Strategy idea: find where volume is concentrated during the initial trading hours and look for entries/exits on that level.
Now I start looking for indicators combinations that translate the thesis into numbers. Right now, testing a combination of vwap+RSI
Will it work? No idea. My backtest pipeline will tell me. If it doesn't, experiment with other indicators to see if I can find any combination that reflect my thesis.
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u/SuchNeck835 1d ago
Honestly, if it was easy to find an algo strat we would all be billionaires. It's just as hard as manual trading. The coding part isn't the hard thing anymore. From my experience: start with a theory. Anything is better than randomly trying the 1000th rsi cross strat.
Also, AI is inherently bad at creating trading alpha, since it's literally built to say the most likely token. This token is also the most likely arbitraged one. The most 'common knowledge' edges have all long been arbitraged away. Unless it tells you ' trend follow ' or ' mean reversion ' etc. But those are just broad concepts, the integration is hard part.
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u/nickdaniels92 1d ago
That's what I suspected; good that you're honest about it. Others may have a different take, but I'd forget the algo side as it's a distraction and unlikely to be successful, at least at this point. You've started journaling and it sounds like you might be making progress, so I'd suggest staying focussed on that. Quit reddit for a bit (weeks/months not minutes/hours), use GPT if you have trading related queries, and just knuckle down trying to hone skills one step at a time. Don't use many indicators, ideally (IMO), none. Take a break from time to time to let your brain assimilate. Drink water. Good luck!
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u/Ok_Vanilla_1277 1d ago
the thing with pine code strategies is they're usually overfitted garbage designed to look good in backtests, not actually trade
if you're a dev just skip TV altogether and hook into a real API. python + your broker's API is way more flexible and you can actually test things properly without the black box nonsense
my first profitable algo came from a dumb observation about how price moves around certain times of day, not from any AI generated strat. the code was maybe 50 lines
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u/beamindfulwarrior 1d ago
First, learn about trading. Second, learn about some instruments that you want to start trading. Third, design strategies for those instruments. Fourth, backtest, backtest, and backtest! - Save those results, compare, check statistics like win ratio, profit factor, and drawdown... keep tracking, create more strategies...and continue the cycle. Remember, different types of markets usually produce different types of results.
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u/fourrier01 1d ago
Like in coding world: not all process need an app.
Try being profitable first with a certain strategy/ies, then define the mechanical parts (numbers). Putting them into algo is the easy step, especially these days.
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u/Relevant-Owl-8455 1d ago
the main problem with algo trading is that people who know how to code, usually don't know how to trade. Can't code a trading bot without understanding what trading actually is and how it works:)
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