Orientation

This is a blog space to help develop some ideas, research and a strategy to employ trading algorhytms using Python and Interactive Brokers.

I'm coming to this with over five years of cryptocurrency background and market knowledge-- one could say significant time in the market and exposure over this period.

I'll be using Chat-GPT and DeepSeek to help with research, along with books and articles-- perhaps some video too. The goal is to document general research and also the refinement of the strategy and what's being employed in terms of code and specifications.

The first thing to try will be a scalping bot to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana over USDT because scalping is suitable for beginners and the majors have the most liquid markets.

There will be a rule-based system in place, and we'll touch on that in the coming days.

It's likely to involve 0.5% of the trading account equalling 1 risk or 1R. The stop loss could be at 10% for a 5% portfolio allocation, or $50 trades on a $1000 trading account as an example of sizing.

I've opened my Interactive Brokers account and will be getting set up there over the next few days. I've got a couple of books lined up on Trading Strategy and Python and will be diving into those next week. The Python book I've got coming is Python Programming for Beginners by Phillip Robbins but I will also follow the recommendations for "Python for Everyone" by Horstmann and Necaise, "Python Crash Course" by Eric Matthes, and "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz.

For online resources I'll look at Codecademy, Coursera, and edX aswell as PY4e.com

I'll be getting setup with Python interfaces such as Thonny (for beginners) and Visual Stuido code (more advanced) and will be looking at back-testing some code over the next couple of weeks.