Case Summary

During one of my trips to my motherland, The Dominican Republic, I had a conversation with my brother-in-law about his journey into forex trading. Knowing I had been working for 3 years already as a software engineer, he pitched me the idea to build an expert advisor for MetaTrader.

He had the trading strategy, and I had the software knowledge, so we decided to meet up and lay out how to approach this. The goal being to both benefit from the profits of this expert advisor. I had never developed an expert advisor so I found it to be an interesting challenge with some very nice financial upside if it went well.

I built the bot using MetaTrader's MQL 5 framework, but it is not as profitable as we hoped for, at least using the demo account setup. Turns out automating a trading strategy is just the tip of the iceberg. The bot now needs thorough backtesting, and tuning in order to reach a test profitability that would make us comfortable to put real money into.

My Take

I liked how this project introduced to me many investing/trading concepts that I had little grasp of previously. I also enjoyed learning a new framework and its underlying intricacies that steered me into a new terrain of program flow and best practices. Which in turn gave me a broader array of possibilities when it comes to what kind of programs I can build.

I may pick up this project some time in the future during my free time to further tune it, and check out what things can come from it. For the time being, I am focusing on other topics that will further advance my journey to become a senior software engineer, such as diving deeper into distributed systems for instance.