You’ve always wanted to trade stocks when you were younger. You’ve seen the wonders of options trading and how fast people can get rich with it. But now that you’ve had your first internship money, you seem somewhat hesitant to get into the game. You stumble because you don’t know where to start in this process, what stocks to buy, how much to invest, whether you should diversify, etc. Most of all, you don’t want to lose your first paycheck. Introducing paperbot.io, a web application that allows users in similar situations like you to learn the way of the market.
Essentially, paper trades are trading without real money. To achieve this, we leveraged the open-source paper trading API, Alpaca, to simulate to users what it’s like to use their real money. Through working with the Alpaca API, we realized that there are many APIs out there that don’t necessarily get the love and attention that they deserve. We couldn’t agree more with Alpaca’s mission statement - to encourage others into the process of trading using the power of computer science algorithms and trading. We wanted to construct a simple UI that allows Alpaca users to tap into their API with ease and build their own trading algorithms.
What’s novel about the way we approach this problem is giving our users the ability to create their own algorithms from scratch. Users have the ability to configure certain events that could set off a buy or sell order. Particularly, instead of building a trading bot where users would have no idea how orders execute on their end, we pursued the educational aspect of trading algorithms so users could make more informed decisions about the market.
We learned a lot about time management and brainstorming ideas, since coming up with this idea was rather difficult. Ultimately, we learned the most about leveraging open source projects to our advantage. There are many other open-source projects like Alpaca that we can grow as developers.
We hope that paperbot.io changes the way that people learn and look at trading.
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