TDD Example: Rule #1 Trading with Alpaca (1)

First of all, register for a Paper trading account at https://alpaca.markets.

The test of that step completed is:

from alpaca.trading.client import TradingClient

from creds import api_key, secret_key

alpaca = TradingClient(api_key, secret_key, paper=True)

If the command above passes, it means your credentials are correct and you can proceed to fetching price data.

Here is why it makes sense to learn to trade, even if you don't have much to invest:

These top quant hedge funds are your competition. Armies of PhDs designing neural networks that take into account hundreds of factors that you can't capture with simple rules-based systems. Just look at some graduate quant finance textbooks, I have done graduate level math classes and even to me the math is too advanced, and that's all old news already because it's written in textbooks, so the market is already aware of it.

On the other hand, you do have at least one huge advantage: Your trading universe is far larger, so you can trade small and micro caps, as the portfolio sizes of the institutions would move the market too much for even a small share of a microcap.

– https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/12na2zh/how_naive_is_to_try_create_trading_bots_using/

So, it makes sense to learn to trade especially when you do not have much to invest!

In the next step, we will try to get price data required for the strategy.