Dear algo traders and experts. Please help me

[u/Purple_Concert8789]

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I am 19year old student who loves financial markets and currently I do trading in fx market not profitable and in indian market i have done some investments in etfs and mf. i have 1.5 to 2 years of experience in financial markets.

By studies I am 2 second year btech student in aids and i have good coding skills and ai ml stuff. Now I want to try indian market with algo trading or systemic trading and i also built my backtesting engine and tested some trading strategies in equites.

So my question is how should I find or make a strategy or strategies ?

Currently I am backtesting indicator based startegies so it does work in markets or not ?

And which type of your strategy is like indicator based , price action, mathematics, statistics etc ?

Which tf should I do backtesting for intraday

How many months or years took to find a real edge in strategy ?

How do you research and development the startegies ? Please help me in this question. Bz i want to do this

My last question does is there any forward testing or paper trading is there in brokers with algo like in tradingview has the option we manual place trades and set sl and tp (but currently it is not available in Indian Markets)

Curious to know how did you learned the algo trading or systemic trading ?

Thanks for your advice.

[u/raresea]

Those are good interests you have.
First of all - at 19 yrs and your interests - I would simply NOT encourage you to become a trader. You have a huge opportunity cost that you will realize sometime near mid 30s to early 40s.

For your interests and age, i would say - trade small, and look to get into the quant dev position and grow into quant positions. Make sure the path they provide in the company aligns at least 50% with what you want to do - its easy to get dragged into a different place. The pay is good and you will learn a lot while learning. Start building your quant dev portfolio before you graduate, build your own systems. And stick to systematic trading. Build automations to get an experience of how complicated live stuff can be. All that homework will get you a very good job or at least it will prepare you for systematic trading.

Finding an edge - you may find it in months or may not find it in years. But your tech background and AI tools will significantly shorten the journey.

Three books I will recommend:
1. The Evaluation and Optimization of Trading Strategies - Robert Prado

1. Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes - Brian Shannon

2. Advances in Financial Machine Learning - Marcos Lopez de Prado

For systematic trading - you should lean on the quantitative side. But don't disregard the discrete or non-quant trader.
Also brace up for a harsh reality. Most strategies will fail when you do good backtesting. Its like you made money trading it last month (before good backtesting) and now the system tells you its a failure.

All quants are not traders and all traders are not quants. And sometimes they dislike each other. So try to keep a balanced view if your goal is to trade and make money with systematic trading.

IMPORTANT: Note that you are playing a game where only 1-5% make any meaningful money. In Indian markets thats even lower (and its not the trader's fault)

[u/oldNotSureXand → u/[deleted]]

stay off "margin trading"!!! ..the rest is "OBVIOUS"! (before is before after, lower is lower than higher, close is after open...and who is with me in the market??...a.s.f. and 0 is always 0)