After a superficial search for the best algo trading tutorial, I arrived at this YouTube video from freeCodeCamp, an organization I’m very familiar with. The video was created by Luke Hardy; his real name is Lachezar Haralampiev. But enough with the cyber-stalking and let’s dive into the course!
The course starts with an overview of algorithmic trading, and the 3 projects that will be covered. The usual warnings - it’s very hard to predict prices yada yada.
But wait! There’s a little nugget of information - apparently it’s not so hard to predict volatility. I need to look into that more, maybe there are some instruments based on volatility measurements that I could potentially trade, like the VIX.
Luke proceeds to the first project - an unsupervised learning trading strategy that uses technical indicators. We’re doing a lot of data manipulation, but I’m already starting to feel demoralized for a couple of reasons:
- I don’t understand why technical indicators work. And I don’t even know where to look for the answer.
- There’s a lot of Python code being written that I’m not familiar with. We’re using libraries and methodologies that seem very specific to this strategy.
I feel like there has to be something simpler I could start with. I take a quick glance at the older freeCodeCamp tutorial that I saw on YouTube. It seems a lot more beginner-friendly. So I give up on this one for now and switch.