1400 days ago, I started building an algorithmic trading platform. Today, I executed my first real trade with it.
Austin Starks · Originally published
8 min read
Update: Dec 4th, 2024: For a step-by-step guide on deploying your algorithmic strategy to the cloud, check out this article.
Four years ago, during my Masters, I drew my first diagram for “the Money Printer”.
I had no idea what the future would hold.
At the time, “algorithmic trading” was barely more than a buzzword to me, like jargon such as “no-code”, “blockchain”, or “artificial intelligence”.
But my education at Carnegie Mellon taught me a lot and I began to see the true value of algorithmic trading. I learned how “AI algorithms” actually worked under the hood.
More importantly, I saw how these models were applied in the real-world. When I had my first big-boy internship, my first project was integrating Google AutoML for automating document classification and triaging. This simple project eliminated the need for manual document tagging, saving the company over $400,000 (as an intern project)!
This experience made me realize how much value AI can bring to businesses. Eventually, I started integrating AI features into my trading platform, such as using genetic algorithms for trading strategy optimization, or using large language models to create strategies using natural language.
And now, 4 years in the making, I’ve executed my first real trade on the world’s most powerful, no-code algorithmic trading platform.
Here’s why this is so important.
To start, what is NexusTrade?
Before I dive into why this is such a big deal, I need to give you some context about the NexusTrade platform.
NexusTrade is the world’s most powerful (and easiest to use) fully automated trading platform. It allows anybody, even you or any non-technical beginner, to deploy nearly any trading idea they can possibly imagine, using an interface that we, as humans, normally communicate with — language.
By using natural language, NexusTrade users are able to interact with the market in a fundamentally unique way. This doesn’t just include creating and testing trading strategies.
For example, this also includes giving users the ability to perform detailed financial research to inform their investing decisions.
By “financial research”, I mean things like:
- Fundamental analysis: using a stock’s earnings statements to measure its financial health
- Stock screening: finding novel investment opportunities based on technical or fundamental data
- Trend analysis: using objective technical and fundamental data to unveil hidden patterns in the stock market
NexusTrade brings these rule-building and backtest comparisons into one interface for retail investors. You can inspect when a condition would trigger, what it would buy or sell, and how the resulting portfolio compares with a benchmark.
Research still needs an execution plan. NexusTrade lets me express the entry condition, position size and exit rules as a trading strategy, then test those rules before choosing an account and deployment target. The December 2024 trade described below was submitted manually; automated order submission was still the next integration step.
What EXACTLY do I mean by “algorithmic trading”?
As I mentioned in the beginning, words like algorithmic trading can seem like jargon. However, it’s surprisingly very informative.
Algorithmic trading refers to the process of using algorithms to execute trades. An algorithm is like a baking recipe – it is a series of steps that you take in order to achieve a desired outcome (like baking a cake or executing a trade).
Put simply, NexusTrade is a platform that allows anybody to create their own “series of steps” (also called a trading strategy) to execute rules in the market.
Here are some of the types of rules you can create with NexusTrade.
Simple rules executed at regular intervals
Most brokerage platforms allow users to create simple trading rules such as Dollar Cost Averaging. An example of this is a strategy like the following:
Spend 5 percent of your buying power in SPY every 14 days
Strategies like this are useful for investors, but they’re not exactly innovative. Within NexusTrade, they’re valuable to demonstrate an idea: a strategy is simply a set of rules for executing trades.
In this example, we will spend 5% of the portfolio’s buying power buying SPY every 2 weeks. We can see that the green line (our strategy) significantly underperforms the grey line (buying and holding SPY). This is both in terms of the raw percent gains this year, and the risk-adjusted returns (as shown by the sharpe and sortino ratio).
Because of these results, we can conclude that we don’t want to deploy this type of strategy unless we’re particularly risk-averse and predicting some form of market downturn.
This information is informative and not easily demonstrable with traditional investing platforms. However, what makes NexusTrade so powerful isn’t the ability to create simple strategies like these. It’s the ability to create sophisticated ones.
Multiple trading rules using complex logic
In addition to simple trading rules, NexusTrade allows you to create portfolios with sophisticated trading strategies. The screenshot above shows a strategy set called “Buy TQQQ and double down when positions are down. Sell a small portion when positions are up.” Let’s take a look at the rules:
- Buy 50 percent of buying power in TQQQ Stock under specified conditions
- Buy 25 percent of buying power in TQQQ Stock under specified conditions
- Buy 10 percent of buying power in TQQQ Stock under specified conditions
- Sell 5 percent of portfolio in TQQQ Stock when (# of Days Since the Last Filled Sell Order > 30) and (TQQQ Positions Percent Change ≥ 10)
To understand what “under specified conditions” means, we have to zoom in on the condition. For example, by clicking the “Buy more aggressively when starting” button, we can see the 3 conditions. They are
- # of Days Since the Last Filled Buy Order > 7 AND
- Portfolio Value < 17000 AND
- (Position Value < 100) or (TQQQ Positions Percent Change < -20)
What this means is, we will trigger the strategy to buy 50 percent of buying power in TQQQ if every one of these conditions are triggered.
Similar rules exist for the other 3 strategies. They dictate exact rules for when the strategy should execute actions in the market.
The beauty of this is that it shows exactly when we will enter (or exit) a trade and why this will happen. It’s also replicable, which changes trading from an art (as demonstrated on social media) into a science.
Finally, the UI also shows the historical performance of these rules in different market conditions.
For example, while the above screenshot shows the performance of this strategy in the past two years (during a bull market), we can change the backtest to show us the performance of this strategy from 2020 to 2022.
In the displayed 2020–2022 comparison, the TQQQ portfolio lost 40% while SPY buy-and-hold gained 12%. The article also reports worse drawdown and risk-adjusted return. This TQQQ portfolio uses conditional purchases of 50%, 25% and 10% of remaining buying power and a conditional sale sized at 5% of portfolio value. Those rules create different exposure from investing the full balance in SPY at the start. The printed excerpt gives one complete entry condition, but omits the other entry conditions, exact boundary dates and starting cash/positions. Use the linked saved portfolio beside the chart to inspect that configuration before interpreting the gap.
Being able to extract these insights and test out different algorithmic trading strategies is extremely valuable all by itself.
However, today, I made a huge leap forward, by executing a real trade directly in the NexusTrade platform.
Executing a REAL trade with NexusTrade
While the ability to create and test trading strategies is useful, up until now, its been solely a paper-trading platform. What this means is that while you could deploy your strategies to the market, you were trading monopoly money to get practice and learn how algorithmic trading works.
However, I’m excited to share that at approximately 7:25PM EST, I made my first real trade with actual money using NexusTrade.
While this trade was manually triggered (so not executed by one of my trading strategies), finishing the integration with Alpaca is now almost entirely done.
The architecture is built, and the plumbing is implemented, and fully autonomous trading is within grasp for every single retail investor in the world.
And you can get started right now by clicking sign up or clicking the link below.
Deploy Algorithmic Trading Strategies - NexusTrade Live Trading
We've integrated with Alpaca to allow you to deploy algorithmic trading strategies in a live trading environment.
nexustrade.io
Why this matters?
This December 1, 2024 milestone was my first real-money trade through NexusTrade, placed at approximately 7:25PM EST. I triggered the order manually. The screenshots above show the connected Alpaca account and the order form; strategy-driven automatic execution was still the next step in the integration.
NexusTrade isn’t a black-box buzzword machine that promises ridiculous returns with its “AI Algorithms”. It is a tool that anybody can use and learn how to trade with.
It facilitates financial research, helps people bring their ideas to life, and does so in a UI so easy that my 13 year old niece can understand. This makes it easier than ever before for people who want to become profitable in the stock market.
And this is only the beginning. With the integration of live-trading, more possibilities are unlocked. For example, people are going be able to share their trading ideas within their social circles in an objective, systematic, and replicable way. This increases financial literacy and accessibility because you can clearly articulate how you are making money in the stock market.
Moreover, this sets the bar for future investing platforms. It’s not enough to claim to use AI; you have to use AI to bring real value to the people using your software.
My journey through Carnegie Mellon and my past internships has helped shape NexusTrade into the platform it is today. Early in my career, I’ve demonstrated the value of AI, even as an intern. Now, I’m showing how it can be used to make algorithmic trading accessible to billions of people.
I cannot understate how big of a deal this actually is.
Thank you for reading! If you want to be one of the first to deploy an algorithmic trading strategy with just a few clicks, then click this link and join the AI revolution!
Deploy Algorithmic Trading Strategies - NexusTrade Live Trading
We've integrated with Alpaca to allow you to deploy algorithmic trading strategies in a live trading environment…
nexustrade.io
Follow me: LinkedIn | X (Twitter) | TikTok | Instagram | Newsletter
Listen to me: Spotify | Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts
No comments yet.