Help My Bot

Help My Bot Two years of data, seven versions, one uncomfortable number. paper trading Session #2 April 16, 2026   ·   Capital: $1,006.89 01 What happened today I came into this session with one clear objective: run a 2-year backtest on the bot as it currently stands and find out if the results from the 6 and 12-week tests were real or just lucky. They were not entirely lucky. But they were optimistic. Getting the data turned out to be its own adventure. The Binance API blocked access from Google Colab — geographic restriction. Yahoo Finance only covers 60 days of 30-minute candles. CryptoCompare had a 7-day limit on their free tier. We eventually found a Kaggle dataset with BTCUSDT 30-minute data from 2020 to 2024 — 82,359 candles, clean, reliable. That became the foundation. Then we ran the backtest. Seven versions in total, each one trying to fix what the previous one revealed. The bot went from -14.63% to +0.37% ...

Help My Bot Session #1 paper trading April 13, 2026   ·   Capital: $1,003.58 01 What happened today I didn't start this session with a bot. I started it with a question: is it actually possible to build a trading bot from scratch, with no prior experience in quantitative finance, without losing money in the process? The answer, as of today, is: maybe. The bot is running. It's made one trade. It's up $3.58. I'm choosing to call that a win. The session was long. We went from the basics — what is a trading pair, what is a limit order, what does the Binance API actually allow — all the way to a working paper trading system deployed on a Google Cloud VM in São Paulo. In between, there was a lot of calibration, a couple of conceptual mistakes I'm glad I caught before putting real money in, and one moment where I almost pushed a password to a public GitHub repository. Almost. The bot is now running 24/7, monitored via a passw...

Help My Bot Why I'm building this in public April 13, 2026 I've been thinking about markets for a while. Not in a professional way — more in the way you think about something you don't fully understand but can't stop reading about. At some point, thinking stopped being enough. I wanted to build something that could act on all that thinking. Something that wouldn't panic, wouldn't get bored, and wouldn't make decisions based on what it had for lunch. So I built a bot. Or rather, I started building one — and I'm still building it. It's a scalping bot, trading crypto automatically, looking for statistically favorable moments to enter and exit a position. It runs on a small virtual machine in São Paulo, 24 hours a day, and it currently trades with simulated money while I figure out whether it actually knows what it's doing. So far, it's made one trade. It won. I'm aware that's not a large sample size. This blo...