Next goal - Some kind of stock trading tool

As soon as I noticed that making a public “goal of the year” seemed to work, I started to think about what the goal for 2020 would be. While I’m was very tempted to continue with a goal related to game development, I decided to make the goal to complete a thing that I have had om my to-do list for a long time, a stock trading tool. Not a tool that will automatically make trades for me, but a tool that can help me keep track and point out potential buy and sell opportunities.

I have for a few years been buying and selling stocks and many times I felt I missed opportunities because I’m wasn’t actively enough monitoring stock charts. Having a tool that could alert me when set criteria are meet would be very useful.

So because I felt that I’m missing out on money, I wanted to take a year and focus on creating a trading tool. I’m not sure that I will make any money from this but I least I will have tried.

Goal specifications

The tool needs to be able to display and analyze stock charts and to do that it also will need a way to obtain stock data. Obtaining good data for free is to first hurdle I need to find a solution for. The second hurdles will most likely be to develop a graphic component that allows me to draw lines on a chart (and save them for future references).

My exact needs are hard to tell right now. I have some more ideas, but I will take it step by step, evaluating my needs at every step.

Sharing the progress

I plan on sharing some thought about trading, the design of the tool and how successful it is (or isn’t), but I will most likely not share any source code for this project. The two main reasons for not sharing any code is that I don’t want to share any tools for mass-download of stock data and I don’t want anyone using the tool for recommendations without understanding how it calculates them. First reason is purely egotistic, if anyone else misuses the tool my source of stock data might get removed. And the second reason is to protect others from potential economical losses.

/Henrik

(PS: This post was originally written before the big corona stock market crash. The goal still stands and I’ll probably talk about the crash in another post.)