Hi, Curious to hear if most of you traders that work with financial data are already sufficient with programming or if it's a long process for you to start learning how to code, in addition to being a trader / analyzing the market and coming up with trading strategies ?
I was a programmer first but every professional trader I know who has started in the last decade (and has become consistently profitable) is learning to code in one way or another. It's absolutely necessary for the very least, to write all the little annoying scripts you need to do repetitive stuff.
The whole reason I began to code, in 1998, was to be able to look at data and test some ideas. Getting ideas was expensive in those days. Even now, I don't trust anyone to give away their best ideas, or to even understand the ideas they give away, especially coming to money management. I started with Excel formulas and soon hit the wall and felt really free to master some competency in VBA to work within arrays. I just finished a two week stretch of VBA to handle some data. It feels empowering to learn what data can tell you. I use it to also assist manual gathering of data from drawings on Traderview charts, drawings that Pinescript can't read and collate. So it's manual data entry made easier with code...until such time that I can duplicate the rules to a Pinescript. Come time to execute, I will be relying on bits of code to monitor and automate several tasks. When learning, Google is your friend.
It'll depend on what you need to achieve, what kind of platform you're working on, and finally, your chosen programming language. Personally, I began years ago with Ninjatrader, which uses C# and it does a great job teaching from zero. Still, you'll soon realize, that if you have fancier ideas, you need to master another level of programming, not to mention if even you ever wanted to build your own app with a broker-API. I'm aware that nowadays, many chose Phyton as a language that is easier to learn and use and facilitates goals but I hate slow language, it seems for children. Unfortunately, not being a C.S or similar can be very hard if you have serious ideas. I studied economics, therefore my path has been hard but motivating cause I stick with C, C# and C++.
don't you feel it's wasting time on things an analyst shouldn't be doing ? our jobs as traders and investors it to research the market and come up with ideas, not learning how to code. Why is that happening in your opinion, as oppose off-loading the the programming somewhere else ?
Are you using the coding skills you acquired to mainly sort the data you already posses and clean | to fetch new data for research | or to run strategies with the data ?
That's exactly the point of my post you studied economics ! why waste time on developing coding skills, when you can utilize a service to do so ? Am curious about that
Just my opinion, it's the difference between cooking at home and going out to eat. You get exactly what you want when you want it.
Well, to be honest: - I don't like the idea to share my thoughts or I.P with a platform no controlled by me - I know exactly what my code does. Coordinating the coding part with 3th party might be hard
Python is slower but not slow. Anything with larger amounts of data is done with numpy, numba or anything else that is written in C but is much easier and faster to write than pure C. No-one really uses pure python for stock data. Ask yourself, why is python the number one language for machine learning?