Day #941
Constant headaches? Facial breakouts due to stress? Not hungry, too busy for fun things, can’t sleep a night through? Watching a rash appear on your chest while you cry in your car? Hey, you must be a Bot Creator too, or a Bot Creator’s girlfriend.
Here are Three Steps to Help you Build Your Trading Bot…
Step #1- Dedication and Persistence
It’s been 2 years, 6 months, and 28 days of Solomon working and thinking on only one thing: Programming an Algorithmic Trading Bot. It has been our entire life since we started dating. After high school graduation and some community college, we both felt like Trading was his “calling.” Of course, once we felt like God wanted him to do this, we put our all into it. We’d rather be excellent at one thing than okay-ish at a lot of things; trading was more full-time to us than our full-time jobs. We both went through the two year CCU course multiple times and spent many nights and days without sleep.
It’s not a fun career, you can’t schedule and plan, you aren’t promised the pay-check at the end of the week, and if we didn’t still have our day jobs we wouldn’t be able to buy gas. Thankfully God provides.
(I created this series because it is so important to track progress along the way. I’m sharing as I go, through our mess-ups and fails, because that’s how you can learn too. Failure is education that should be valued because it hurts!)
Step #2- Strategy
There are so many strategies out there, you really have to find the one that resonates with you. In one of my favorite trading books: The Disciplined Trader , he mentions how trading is a means of expressing ones self, and that really stuck with me because the moment those words came off the page they became true to me. There aren’t any real rules, you can code up any new indicator you want, use it however you please. The Market gives you the opportunity to do whatever the heck you want. It may do hurt, or do good, but it’s still what you wanted to do; it’s freedom.
All the Market gives you, is price action. It will move up and down, that’s all it promises. Now, can you find a strategy that wins slightly more than you lose? This is a very difficult task, especially when you’re creating automation, but nothing is impossible.
A helpful tool we recently discovered is Forex Factory, this site shows you the best/worst times to trade currencies based off media news. We all know trading by the headlines is a sure way of losing all your money… that brings us to our next step.
Step #3- Money
You can spend so much time on Demo accounts and it’ll cost you nothing, it’s just not the same when you don’t have any greens on the line. You’ll be on a winning streak in demo, building the courage to switch to your real account, and BAM! You lose every trade once you switch to a real account. I’m not sure the science behind this but It’s so, so true. It’s not costing you anything and the thrill isn’t there. To be serious with Trading, it’s going to take your money, time, sleep, short term happiness, and so on. BUT! In the end, it’ll give it all back and more. You need a long-term perspective, you have to keep trying, keep working, keep brainstorming, keep pushing until it breaks, and you win! (I’m not talking about revenge trading, because that’s never a good idea).
Another great tool: Fiver. We’ve spent tons of money on coders and specialist to help us build our bot. I can’t imagine how far behind we would be without the help of our friends at Fiver.
Any Trader friends out there reading, this is your sign to keep trying and stop thinking about giving up. Life is about stamina, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to if you don’t get worn out first. It always gets dreadfully hard right before the glorious breakthrough. 🙂 Put those goals of yours a little closer to you face.
Thanks for reading my blog! -Elaina
Elaine Kate 