Getting Started — Part 2: What Is Algorithmic Trading? (A Non-Coder's Take)
When people hear "algorithmic trading," they picture hedge fund servers in Manhattan, PhDs in math, screens full of candlestick charts. Something serious and intimidating and definitely not for people like me. My version looked a little different. For the first few weeks, my trading bot ran on my MacBook. Every time I closed the lid — lunch break, coffee run, falling asleep on the couch — the bot died. No trades, no monitoring, nothing. That problem lasted weeks before I moved everything to a cloud server. This post is for anyone who's heard the term "algorithmic trading" and assumed it wasn't for them. I thought the same thing. Turns out the concept is simpler than it sounds — the hard part is everything else. What Does Algorithmic Trading Actually Mean? Strip away the jargon and it's just this: instead of a human deciding when to buy and sell, a set of rules makes that decision automatically. That's it. The rules can be simple — "if...