Files
trading/shared/curriculum/bill-track.md
bill d794910697 Initialize trading project — Bill & Colette learning tracks
Two-person trading team setup: Bill (quant/algorithmic) and Colette (market observer).
Includes phase-by-phase curriculum, separate sprint tracks, trade journal templates,
roadmap to prop firm challenge, and agent handoff documentation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-05-11 09:54:19 -07:00

3.5 KiB

Bill's Learning Track — Quant / Algorithmic

Background: Data scientist, ML experience, cybersecurity/scripting skills Role: Build and validate — data pipelines, backtests, models, automation, alerts


Phase 1 — Market Data Infrastructure

Goal: Get clean, reliable data into your toolchain

  • TradingView Pine Script basics — indicators, alerts, screeners
  • Python market data: yfinance, pandas-ta, ccxt (crypto if relevant)
  • Free vs paid data sources — what's actually needed at this stage
  • Build a basic OHLCV data fetcher for a watchlist of tickers
  • Understand data quality issues: survivorship bias, split adjustments, gaps
  • Set up a local data store (SQLite or Parquet) for backtesting

Deliverable: Script that pulls daily OHLCV for a watchlist and stores it locally


Phase 2 — Indicator Implementation & Backtesting

Goal: Implement and test common signals before trusting them

  • Implement SMA, EMA, RSI, MACD, ATR from scratch (don't just use a library — understand them)
  • Build a simple backtesting loop (vectorized, not event-driven to start)
  • Understand backtest traps: look-ahead bias, overfitting, survivorship bias
  • Walk-forward validation basics
  • Metrics: win rate, expectancy, Sharpe ratio, max drawdown, Calmar ratio
  • Pine Script: build a simple strategy and view equity curve in TradingView

Deliverable: One complete backtest with proper train/test split and metrics reported


Phase 3 — ML Signal Generation

Goal: Apply ML where it actually adds value (not everywhere)

  • Feature engineering for price data (returns, rolling stats, lagged features)
  • Classification: predict direction (up/down/flat next N bars)
  • Avoid the common traps: data leakage, overfitting short samples
  • Evaluate with financial metrics, not just accuracy
  • Regime detection: is the market trending, ranging, or volatile?
  • Understand when ML helps vs when simple rules beat it

Deliverable: A classifier that outputs trade signals with a documented edge (positive expectancy on out-of-sample data)


Phase 4 — Automation & Alerting

Goal: React to markets without staring at screens

  • TradingView alerts → webhook → Python handler
  • Build a market watch script (runs on schedule, flags setups from Colette's criteria)
  • Notification system (email, SMS, or Telegram bot)
  • Paper trading automation: auto-log triggered trades to journal
  • Understand execution risk: slippage, partial fills, latency (not HFT, but real)

Deliverable: Script that monitors a watchlist and sends an alert when Colette's setup criteria are met


Phase 5 — Prop Challenge Execution

Goal: Apply the system under challenge conditions

  • Simulate challenge rules in paper trading: daily loss limit, max drawdown, profit target
  • Risk sizing formula locked in (never manual)
  • Dashboard: daily P&L, drawdown remaining, progress toward profit target
  • Post-trade review script: auto-generate stats from journal
  • Two clean simulated challenge passes before paying

Deliverable: Automated prop challenge tracker with real-time status


Tools & Stack

Purpose Tool
Charting TradingView
Data yfinance, pandas, pandas-ta
Backtesting Custom vectorized or backtesting.py
ML scikit-learn, lightgbm
Automation Python scripts + cron or systemd
Alerts TradingView webhooks + custom handler
Storage SQLite or Parquet files