For the Simulation Assignment, instead of trying to simulate something “I” would do in my daily life, I decided to simulate something the inverse of me would do.
My friends and I often joke that in an alternate universe there exists a “Shadow August” that’s a hedge fund manager, does a lot of coke, and exclusively drinks vodka-soylent cocktails. So I wanted to explore what that August might do for this assignment, and since he probably does a lot of day trading, he would want a cryptocurrency trading bot.
So I started learning about trading bots and did a lot of research on how I would actually go about doing that, and after a few hours of noodling around in python and node I realized a few things:
I don’t understand how money works
Buy low/ Sell High is very easy to implement in code and that code will almost always make you lose all your money.
Linking a real world bank account to a script that could, if the code was wrong, execute thousands of orders in less time than it takes to press Ctrl-C, is very very scary.
Bitcoin ended up tanking the week I was working on this code, which felt like a sign that I was either a genius for doing this now or an idiot that should stay very far away.
There’s a reason this-universe-August does not day trade.
I was able to use Coinbase’s Sandbox API to create some code in Node that allowed me to practice getting market data and use the data to execute buys/sells of my BTC, but I wasn’t able to tweak the algorithm to make it work flexibly in a volatile trade environment, so I stopped before putting real money on the line.
I also like the interesting twist that if this bot actually worked well and I made a ton of money, I would want to focus more of my efforts in this realm, potentially eventually morphing into Shadow August, the very thing I thought would be my opposite…. Who would I be then????