5 Super Simple Beginner Project Ideas For Traders Learning Coding
The way to actually get good at coding is not by reading, it’s by building.
There are hard limits to how far you can get by theory alone. Eventually you have to materialize what you’ve learned in the real world.
And the best way to do this is by choosing a beginner project in an area that actually interests you.
Which is why yesterday I tweeted this:
It got a good response so I thought you guys would enjoy a full list of these little project ideas, ideal for getting started.
I hand picked these examples because they are legitimately useful without being overly intimidating or time consuming.
1. Volume Spike Detector
Write a script to identify when there is significantly higher than average volume of buy/sell activity in a market you follow.
Your first task is observing what the usual volume levels are for this market. Charting tools like TradingView can help you there.
Next, look along the historical data for the chart. Have their been volume spikes that signaled interesting price action soon after? Note the quantities of volume that marks such incidents, and select an average as your threshold.
Use your exchange/broker of choice, connect to their API (every one will have documentation to help you navigate this), and try to access the volume data for the daily candles.
2. Whale Tracker
This one’s for the crypto traders. For those of you who don’t know, most blockchain info is publicly accessible, it’s part of the system.
In particular, the contents of a crypto wallet is visible for all to see (most of the time), if you know the unique address ID.
This means you can actually monitor the wallets with large crypto holdings and set up a tracker for whenever they make a transaction.
Some traders like doing this because they believe it grants insight into how a particular market is about to move.
For example, if a whale moved 1000 BTC from their cold storage to Coinbase, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume they intend to sell in large volume.
To get you started, here is a rich list of some of the largest known Bitcoin wallets. You can plug those addresses into a block explorer like this to get even more information.
3. Twitter Bot
Did you know you can scan Twitter for all tweets which contain a specific phrase? You can even get more specific than that with your filters.
There are infinite ways you can use this feature as a trader, but one of the most interesting I’ve come across is to use it to monitor niche projects.
Set up a tracker script for small cap altcoins or stocks and have it notify you whenever there are more than x tweets about it per hour or day.
This increase in chatter could indicate that volume is about to flow into that market and your automated system would give you an edge over those who are just browsing Twitter regularly.
4. Technical Indicators
I love talking about technical indicators because they often form the bedrock for my algorithms.
In order to implement these bots I had to reconstruct the indicators myself by taking the incoming price data and putting it into the right statistical functions to get the corresponding values I was looking for.
You can use Python libraries TA Lib and Tulipy to help you do exactly that.
The cool thing about having indicators down in code is that you are then free to edit them yourself!
You can make a custom moving average, or an oscillator that gives you a faster trigger signal. Now you’re thinking like a technical trader.
5. Portfolio App
Check how your investments/trades are doing at any time!
This one is easy because current price data for any stock/coin/currency is always extremely accessible from a number of APIs.
Create some way for you to input the amount of each you own, then multiply those amounts by their respective values. Add them altogether and you have your portfolio.
From there it’s not too much of a leap to track performance over time. You can put this into a graph and start making deductions about what is impacting your profitability over time!
I hope these examples sparked some good ideas for you guys. Let me know if you follow up by building any of them.
If there’s interest I’ll also do a follow up piece about intermediate project ideas to tackle for once you feel like you’re past the beginner stage.
Those of you who have enrolled in Cypher’s Automated Trading Masterclass already know that we take this project-oriented approach as we progress through the curriculum.
All students start by learning the fundamentals of Python then quickly progress into actually creating their own trading bot scripts, using the code provided as a base.
I designed the course around the principle that real learning comes from engaging with code in the real world, not just reading about it.
Enroll here: cypherscope.com/buy-masterclass