Getting Started with Forex Trading Using Python

Discover how today's forex market works and understand the essential risks in forex algo trading and how to mitigate them

Key Features

• Research and build trading applications without advanced Python programming skills
• Dive into professional fx trading and make your algo trading apps more adequate for the real market
• Develop simple yet efficient backtesting applications which help you keep the expectations realistic

Book Description

Algo trading, especially in the forex market, has long been very popular among programmers and especially Python professionals because of the visible simplicity to start. However, statistics say that only less than 5% of traders are able to survive in this market. One of the reasons is that developers of algo trading applications do not take into consideration many important features of this market and have their live results radically differ from expectations

The book is a comprehensive guide to anything market-related: data, orders, trading venues, and risk. From the programming side, it explains the general architecture of trading applications, focuses on systemic risk management, covers many de-facto industry standards such as FIX protocol, TA-lib, and scikit-learn gives practical examples of using basic pattern recognition to identify market behavior, explains how to create realistic tests, and finally considers a number of sample apps with full code

By the end of this book, you will learn to retrieve market data, clean it up and filter it, compress it into various formats, apply trading logic, emulate the execution of orders, and test the trading app before trading live

What you will learn

• Run reliable backtesting emulating real-world conditions
• Translate trading ideas into code
• Understand the essentials of fundamental and technical analysis
• Use popular technical analysis and machine learning libraries
• Connect to data sources and check the integrity of market data
• Use API and FIX protocol to send orders

Who This Book Is For

This book is for Financial traders and Python developers who are interested in forex trading. Academic researchers who want to focus on practical applications will also find this book useful. On the other hand, this book can be a fit for even established fx market professionals who would like to take the first steps in algo trading. In order to learn from this book, you should have a solid understanding of OOP and Python in particular with a general understanding of network protocols and interfaces. No advanced knowledge about markets and trading is required

Table of Contents

1. Developing trading strategies: why it's different+
2. Using Python as the language of choice for trading strategies development]
3. FX market overview from developer's standpoint
4. General design of a trading application]
5. Retrieving and Handling Market Data with Python and Pandas
6. Basics of Fundamental and Technical Analysis and its Implementation in Python
7. Using patterns recognition in FX trading with Python]
8. Classification of trading strategies and their core elements
9. Types of orders and their simulation in Python
10. Backtesting: theoretical performance
11. [Sample breakout strategy using stop orders]
12. Sample mean-reverting strategy using limit orders
13. Sample arbitrage strategy using market orders