Do I need to be good at programming?

At minimum, you need to have basic knowledge of python and pandas. Having good programming logic would really helps in the journey. When I started on my freqtrade journey, I didn’t know python, pandas, and linux. I studied them along the way. Even until now, after 3 years, I won’t say I have good programming skill. I still occassionally use google for some issues. So in my opinion, no you don’t have to be a good programmer to have a good strategy. What you must have in my opinion are resilience and self-control.

As said here, programming is just small part of this journey. The biggest (and hardest) part of the journey is to deal with the uncertainty of future. Past is never future. We only have the past data to predict the future behavior, but how to correctly analyze the past is the hardest and important part.

Let me tell you the story of Rick. In term of programming skill, he is way better than me. He has master degree in computer science. He went to top university. He quit his job to pursue the crypto dream. To put cream on top, he put all of his money on the trading bot. As a sign of how good his programming skill was, he was able wrote his own trading bot and dashboard. He didn’t use freqtrade and frequi at all. He joined the discord server just for general question and sharing his bot’s great result, and indeed his result was great. He managed to make around 10% profit per day. Even with such great result, he didn’t satisfied yet. He still trying to have zero slippage (which in my opinion now after 3 years, close to impossible to be done without some sacrifice. More on this topic in separate post).

Later did we know that we were on a strong bull market, hence any strategy would give you profit (another topic for another post). When the market turned its direction, reality hit him really hard. He lost equivalent of $25k in a month. In the end, he had to take the job as pizza delivery man, and let go of his crypto bot dream.

So what went wrong for him? Few things we can learn from Rick

1. The first and most important thing, ONLY USE COLD MONEY. What is cold money? In simple explanation, cold money is money that you can afford to lose them all, which means don’t use money that are needed for your education or mortgages or even for your daily needs.
2. Don’t be greedy. 10% daily profit might be doable in the right market, but is impossible to be done in long term. Read more on this post and this post

As you can see above, Rick’s failure has nothing to do with his programming skill at all. So don’t feel discourage just because you don’t have great programming skill. It won’t be the factor that loses you money.