Programming skills are essential imho. I remember back in the days (early '00s), wanted to backtest ye olde turtle rules. In coffee. In excel, by hand!! agrr. The spreadsheets exploded in size and all got messy. Now I back-test and develop/explore ideas by mainly scripting. Total game changer. Don't use it to auto-route orders or anything, I am too low frequency for that, but developing strategies I could no longer do without. Programming is not a chore, it's great fun on its own but in the context of financial markets, that makes it all the more exciting.
I took a VBA programming course from Coursera last year so I could backtest historical data downloaded into excel. I am a retiree. You can still teach an old dog new tricks.
Solid start. I began writing strategy/backtesting code in the '90s when VB6 was really strong. When MS moved VB6 into the Office product set and re-labeled it VBA, I saw no benefit to moving to VB.net and continued developing with it there. I still use it for strategy/backtesting and don't foresee any reason to migrate to a different language. However to utilize IB's API's for algo and order management, I use VB.net as its one of the example/supported languages. Adapting to VB in the .net environment was "ok" ... the IDE is great, but the evolution of the VB syntax has become more obtuse, and less of what made VB6 the huge success it was in the '90s and as Excel's script language since then ... IMHO. People who think of VBA as "just" Excel's script language don't understand what it is or the history behind it.
There are many free coding videos on YouTube. I also took a Python course at Coursera. I took it for a grade, just to make sure I actually completed it.
Hi, sorry I don't mean to sound lazy, is there a specific youtube video you used that was helpful to you? Also, did you pay for the course at Cousera?
Coursera may have changed by now. the course I took was "Programming for Everybody" https://www.coursera.org/learn/python There are so many coding videos available... Just find a teacher you like, for the language you wish to study. If you want to learn coding for Ninjatrader, study C#, SierraChart uses C++, etc. Many courses are free. good luck
Coursera is free if you audit and not taking it for credit. Just go to the website and search. I took all my Coursera classes as audit, economics 101, finance 101, Game Theory, VBA for Excel and MATLAB programming, all within the last 2-3 years. The toughest course was actually Game Theory, taught by a professor from Stanford, way too theoretical, I had to drop because I couldn't understand a thing he said. All the courses were taught by professors from very good Universities: Stanford, MIT, Colorado, Michigan, U C Irvine...