Trade like Wall Street – A Step-by-step Guide For Deploying Your First Algorithmic Trading Strategy
Create an algorithmic trading strategy without one line of code
Ten years ago, algorithmic trading was reserved for the elite.
Even backtesting a strategy (testing a set of trading rules on historical data) took a ridiculous amount of time and energy. Just to get started, you HAD to know…
- Python or another programming language to code up your algorithm
- Knowledge of statistics to understand how well your algorithm performed
- Proficiency with APIs to fetch the data needed for your algorithms
- Expert with databases to store the financial data and the signals that your algorithms generated
And this doesn’t touch upon the skills needed for other aspects of algorithmic trading, such as trading strategy optimization or deployment.
But now, there is an easy way for you to deploy your first algorithmic trading strategy. And the best part is, you don’t have to write a single line of code.
Here’s how.
Step 1: Create an account on NexusTrade
The very first step is to create an account with NexusTrade.
NexusTrade is an AI-Powered automated investing platform. It makes it easy for anybody, even beginners and non-technical people, to create, test, optimize, and deploy algorithmic trading strategies.
Once we have an account, we will be redirected to the Dashboard page.
The dashboard page you will see after creating a NexusTrade accountFrom here, we will click “Live Trading” and proceed to Step 2.
Step 2) Connect our Alpaca account
Alpaca is a commission-free brokerage platform that allows users to trade stocks, cryotocurrencies, and ETFs via an easy-to-use API. Real trades are sent to Alpaca to be executed.
The Live Trading Page to connect our Alpaca accountSo thus, our next step is to connect our Alpaca account to our NexusTrade account. If we don’t have an Alpaca account, the app will guide us step-by-step on how to create one.
Once we click “Connect with Alpaca”, an important disclaimer will pop-up. Read through it carefully, and once you understand and agree to the terms, sign it as follows:
The Disclaimer that we must sign in order to use live-tradingOnce we click “I understand & Accept”, we will be directed to the Alpaca website. From here, we must sign up or create an account, but its very straightforward to do so.
After creating an account, we will see this message to authorize use of NexusTrade.
Alpaca’s Authorization of use for NexusTradeClick “Allow”, and when we’re done, we’ll be redirected back to NexusTrade!
Finally, our Alpaca account is connected with our NexusTrade account. It’s time to deploy our very first trading strategy!
Step 3) Creating our algorithmic trading strategy
I’ve written litterally hundreds of articles on my Medium about how to create trading strategies with NexusTrade. You can do so using the AI Chat, which converts your plain English words into a strategy, or you can do the easy-to-use no-code UI.
However, there’s also a third option that we will use for this article: the strategy library.
We can navigate to the strategy library from the headerThe strategy library is a collection of pre-configured trading strategies I made to lower the barrier of entry and make it easy for anybody to get started deploying algorithmic trading strategies.
It features strategies like buying FAANG stocks, buying and holding ETFs, leveraged strategies, and more. With just a few clicks, users can explore and deploy proven approaches tailored for different risk appetites and goals.
For this example, we’ll use the popular dollar-cost averaging strategy, a time-tested method for consistent investing.
The dollar cost averaging strategy in the libraryThe dollar cost average strategy involves investing a fixed amount of money at regular intervals. It is designed to reduce the impact of market risk and provide a stable, long-term approach to investing.
Once we click the strategy, we’ll see a more detailed view.
Detailed view of the dollar cost average strategyFrom here, we can decide if we want to create a new portfolio with these rules or if we want to add it to an existing portfolio. In this walkthrough, we’ll add it to our Alpaca, live-trading Portfolio.
Adding the portfolio to our Alpaca PortfolioWe’ll click submit, and voila! We’ll be instantly navigated to our new algorithmic trading strategy.
Finally, Let’s Deploy our Strategy to the Live Market
Our new Alpaca Portfolio with trading strategiesFrom the Portfolio Page, we’ll click “Launch to Market”. This will open up a modal titled, “Deployment Center”.
The Deployment Center lets us deploy our strategiesThe Deployment Center allows us to deploy our portfolio. We have some options, including the Deployment Frequency.
The deployment frequency dictates how often we want our strategies to run. The options are:
- Open-Close Deployment: Our strategies will run once at open and once at close. This more closely mimics the backtests (although intraday backtests are coming soon!)
- Constant Deployment: Our strategies will run constantly thoughout the day.
In this example, I’ll stay with the default (open-close deployment). We’ll click “Start Trading”, and our portfolio will be deployed to the cloud!
Once deployed, the strategies that we created will be continuously checked. If any of our strategy’s conditions are true, it will send us a notification to review our order.
Trading notification that we getAt the same time, we’ll get an in-app notification, forcing us to review our order.
If we decide to execute our trade, we’ll click “Confirm Order”. This will send a real order to Alpaca.
Reviewing an order in NexusTradeConcluding Thoughts
Five years ago, doing something like this just wasn’t possible. Algorithmic trading required technical expertise, knowledge in finance, and coding skills. Now, we just require a computer.
This is game-changer. To recap, we connected our Alpaca account to NexusTrade, and then created and deployed our first algorithmic trading strategy.
Now in reality, we’d probably do much more. For example, we’d probably want to create our own trading strategy using Aurora, and define custom conditions and indicators.
TQQQ Trading Strategy created with the AI ChatBut the process is still 1000x easier than before. We can effortlessly test ideas, perform financial research, and deploy real algorithmic trading strategies to the market.
And once you experience the power of algorithmic trading, you’ll NEVER go back.
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