To The Moon

(reposted to add tags)

Let's be real, trading is not easy. You can have all the right cards in your hand, with all the technical and fundamental analysts screaming to buy, and yet it seems like the moment you choose to cave in and buy a couple shares, the stock decides to plummet 15% the second your position gets filled. It sucks, and it's very demotivating to any new, or experienced investor. This is why some people turn to automated trading to help relieve the headache of watching red all the time.

We all heard about it before, algorithmic trading, aka bots, trade automatically through a set of rules. I had personal experience building my own bot by experimenting with the Tiger Brokers Open API, which I have to say works a charm due to their very detailed documentation and examples, and I have a few good things to say about it. Mainly being:

1. Bots have no emotions. Unlike us inferior humans, we panic when we see red, and struggle to hold when we see green. A bot has no feelings, it doesnt care. All it is trained to do is to see if the stock hits a certain criteria, and then buy or sell according to that.

2. No need for confusing calculations. Who needs to manually input calculations and have 20 tabs open to spy on technical indicators and fundamental analysis just to see if a stock is ripe for buying? Most bots come with built in features to calculate those juicy numbers right there and then using the data they collected, so you won't have to. Tiger’s OpenAPI has a neat set of built in functions to make it wayyyy easier to collect and sift through the data you need.

3. Laziness. Literally, you won't have to do anything. Just click twice to open the bot, and get your first good sleep in months as the bot slaves away doing all the hard work for you.

So all these pros make bots seem like automatic money printers, but of course if they truly were, everyone would be using them. Using bots like these comes with major risks, such as: 

1. Bugs and Glitches. No program is perfect. The website you feed your data from might crash, or a bug might have slipped by the testing phase, and while you're dreaming about swimming in cash, the bot is messing up and buying the wrong shares at the wrong price.

2. Cost of maintenance. That data that the bot is using to make trades has to come from somewhere right? And while most places are supplying that information, it usually comes with a price. And for those even lazier who just want a premade bot so they don't have to do any of the coding, It's gonna be even more expensive. So even if the bot does somewhat well, the cost of maintaining it might tank your profits, or even turn them in to losses

At the end of the day, it seems like it's another high risk high reward situation. And frankly it is, personally, I've had good days and bad days, but I just find that the bot letting me sleep earlier by doing trades for me, is good enough.

@TigerEvents@TigerStars

#OpenAPI #Algorithm #AutomaticTrading