Why algo trading, and how this course works
Algo trading replaces manual clicking with code that: reads market data, decides, and sends orders. The decision logic (the "strategy") is a small part of the system. Most of the effort — and most of what separates a survivable system from an account-blowing one — is in the plumbing around it: authentication, order correctness, risk limits, monitoring, and recovering from failure without human intervention.
This course teaches that plumbing first, strategy second. Each chapter is one atomic capability, in the order you'd actually build a real system:
- Auth & account (ch 1-20) — get into the broker API, read who you are, how much capital and margin you have.
- Market data (ch 21-42) — instruments, historical candles, live ticks via WebSocket.
- Orders (ch 43-68) — every order type and lifecycle event you'll need, from a plain market order to GTT and baskets.
- Risk & positions (ch 69-78) — position sizing, exposure limits, stop-loss automation — the layer that keeps a bad strategy from becoming a ruinous one.
- Strategy & backtesting (ch 79-88) — how to test an idea honestly before it touches real money.
- Operations (ch 89-98) — logging, kill switches, alerting, running unattended, taxes.
- Capstone (ch 99-100) — wire it all together.
How to use this
- Run every code sample. Don't just read it. The broker API has quirks (rate limits, field names, rejection codes) that only show up when you actually call it against a live sandbox/account.
- Use a small amount of real capital or paper trading for the order chapters (43-68). Never learn order mechanics with size you can't afford to lose to a bug.
- Chapters build on each other.
kite,access_token, and helper functions introduced early are reused without re-explanation later.
What this course is not
Not a strategy vendor. No "80% win rate" system. By chapter 85 (overfitting red flags) you'll understand exactly why that framing is a red flag in itself. The goal is that by chapter 100 you can take any strategy idea — yours or someone else's — and either build it safely or correctly reject it.