On Friday I achieve a major milestone, I built an autonomous trading bot to trade for me. I have been working on this for a few weeks and kept getting distracted from “work” but now that I am free, I can dedicate time to building autonomous trading systems.
The image below if from the first trade that was executed 100% autonomously. I didn’t do a single thing. I gave the trading bot some rules and it is executing against them. This is a paper (not real money) account that I am using on Alpaca for testing purposes. I am going to paper trade with it for at least 6 months to a year to ensure it follows the rules and delivers on the strategies I set out.
Let me be clear how this works. I have a scheduled task to happen during the day, the program logs on, finds the optimum trade (based on my rules) and executes it all on it’s own. Right now, my other apps generate trading suggestions but I have to pick them and execute them on my own by logging onto my brokerage account. In this case, I could be on the moon and as long as the computer is up and the internet is working, it will execute trades.
Take A Stroll With Me On Memory Lane
I wrote this post February 23, 2024, it was my excitement at being able to use AI to create images so I didn’t have to waste time on Unsplash.com looking for an image that might match what I was writing about in a post. At that time, I simply typed into a prompt the type of image I wanted and it created it. If I didn’t like the image, ask AI to do it again and a new image comes out in seconds.
And now, 833 days later I have had AI code my first AI trading bot that, if works well, will be the first step in having an AI bot manage my money. And no, I don’t know how to code. My coding experience is limited to a class in high school and a couple in college decades ago.
For this project, I used Claude and it’s amazing. It walked me through everything I needed to do and set everything up. But what should really scare you and blow you away is that AI is only a few years old. AI is not even in Kindergarten yet and it’s already performing at a college level. Imagine what the next 5 years will bring!
Next Steps
I have a few more things in mind. I downloaded the entire US tax code and I will start building my own “tax return software” and experiment with finding ways to optimize my takes. I’ll continue to develop and test my own trading apps customized for my investment style, risk/reward, and capital.
Share The Wealth
Are you building your own trading bot yet? If not, why are you letting me hog all the action?
What broker are you using to get paper accounts and programmatic control over trading? Interactive Brokers?
It’s in my post. https://alpaca.markets/
Using everything in alpaca is free, including market data access? That sounds too good to be true!
Now you know it pays to read GetRichSlick! This is the golden wild west age of AI. Everyone is clamoring for market share so they’ll do whatever it takes to get users. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Nice, definitely going to give this a go… not asking for your secret sauce, but what trading time frame does your bot operate under? What broad strategies does it employ (assuming the secret is in the detailed training/prompts, not the broad strategy)? From your screenshot, looks like that one is some kind of options spread?
The plan was to do put credit spreads on SPX as in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fip0OY11NGg
It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do but with a slight variation. Alpaca doesn’t have SPX accessible in its brokerage right now so I switched to SPY and then it had problems with bid spreads so I switched to QQQ. It’s entirely up to you, my next step is to manage covered calls on TLT using Alpaca since I’m focused on income generation at the moment. I do that manually now and it gets time consuming so anything to automate will be fine. I’ve been fairly transparent about what I’m doing, the secret sauce is in the details not the overall strategy: covered calls, base put ratios, put credit spreads, and a few other things. A lot of the “secret” is simply how much risk/reward ratio you want for yourself.