Book Image

Getting Started with Forex Trading Using Python

By : Alex Krishtop
Book Image

Getting Started with Forex Trading Using Python

By: Alex Krishtop

Overview of this book

Algorithm-based trading is a popular choice for Python programmers due to its apparent simplicity. However, very few traders get the results they want, partly because they aren’t able to capture the complexity of the factors that influence the market. Getting Started with Forex Trading Using Python helps you understand the market and build an application that reaps desirable results. The book is a comprehensive guide to everything that is market-related: data, orders, trading venues, and risk. From the programming side, you’ll learn the general architecture of trading applications, systemic risk management, de-facto industry standards such as FIX protocol, and practical examples of using simple Python codes. You’ll gain an understanding of how to connect to data sources and brokers, implement trading logic, and perform realistic tests. Throughout the book, you’ll be encouraged to further study the intricacies of algo trading with the help of code snippets. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of the fx market from the perspective of a professional trader. You’ll learn to retrieve market data, clean it, filter it, compress it into various formats, apply trading logic, emulate the execution of orders, and test the trading app before trading live.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to FX Trading Strategy Development
5
Part 2: General Architecture of a Trading Application and A Detailed Study of Its Components
11
Part 3: Orders, Trading Strategies, and Their Performance
15
Part 4: Strategies, Performance Analysis, and Vistas

The disadvantages of using Python in trading strategy development

Having praised the advantages of using Python in algo trading, it’s time to mention its important shortcomings. As with many robust and universal ecosystems, these shortcomings are the other side of its advantages.

By any means, the most annoying thing about Python is speed, or, rather, the lack of it. Partly this is pre-determined by the fact that Python is an interpreted language; however, a much greater contribution to the overall slowness is made by weak typing and the same advanced memory management that we love so much when we develop code.

For readers who are not familiar with memory management, I’d recommend starting with a simple article at https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/memory-management-in-python/, which also has references for further reading. In brief, if the language relieves the coder of the burden of declaring variables, then every time the variable is referenced, a number of routines...