Living the dream.

You unleash your trading bot after morning coffee, go about your usual day, and then right before dinner you pull the plug on your bot, transfer your profits to your main account, and enjoy a relaxed evening meal with family and friends. You look forward to doing it again tomorrow.

If you’ve been around for a while then you have the scars to know that fat tail of normal distribution is eventually going to rouse, come swinging out of left field, whack your trading bot, and maybe even your account, into oblivion.

Is that little dose of sagacious cynicism you have about trading bots enough to keep you from looking at any of the other benefits that you could gain from putting your computer to work as your algorithmic trading assistant?

Computers are supposed to make your life easier. And they can.

Here’s one scenario. You like to trade stock options. You have a universe of the 20 most liquid stocks. Before you put your money down you want to know if any stocks in your universe have earning reports coming up, the implied volatility of the next three expirations and if it’s historically high or low, if there is any recent game changing news, if any stocks in your universe are showing unusual options activity. And maybe 10 things more.

Instead of spending x amount of time every morning doing your routine tasks, you can make you computer do them all for you and have a nice, neat report waiting for you at coffee time. That includes the days you’re not feeling so ambitious and might have otherwise let a few things slide.

Maybe all you have to know at this stage is that all those tasks I mentioned above are trivial computer tasks. And you making your computer do them for you every day is not a big deal either. Take a few minutes of your day and start to familiarize yourself with C# and Python.