Unfortunately (or fortunately) I am flat, but my strategies are not really competing with the broad market... Actually my losing years are at the bottom of the market cycle for some reason...
Have you back tested your strategies for down weeks/months? What is the time horizon for you typical trade (days/weeks/months)? Just trying to get a feel for what type of trading you're doing! Congrats by the way :)
Yes, you have to test for years, as many years as you can find data for, to cover at least few market cycles, so you know how your strategy will perform in both bull and bear markets...
You've mentioned you wrote your trading bots in Python, how does one go about doing that? If I write a script that executes buys/sells via an api, I still need to periodically get market data, build candle stick charts (or whatever) and calculate moving averages (or whatever) to then decide to buy and/or sell.
Then to back test, you have to do all that, not with an api, but against and data from a flat file or whatever. I guess you could do it by hand for awhile, but that would certainly become tedious.
It's actually quite complex. Would you recommend anything to read to get started building trading bots?
You'll have to start the other way around: start testing ideas using the back data and in the end you'll have not only the test to prove the theory, but the algo written as well...
The automation after that is easy, the current data is not a problem either, you can get it trough the API from your discount broker, here are the docs for Interactive Brokers for example:
