So in this lecture, I want to answer a question that's probably on the minds of some students in this
course.
The question goes something like, I don't care about math, I just want a trading Bible that tells
me what to do.
Now you might think, what a pleasant surprise the lazy programmer of all people making such a generous
offer.
I would like to present this as a thought exercise, but note that there's nothing stopping you from
doing.
As I describe in this lecture, I will teach you how to get a plug and play trading bot that you can
play in the market without doing any of the math in this course.
OK, so the process is quite simple.
We covered three trading approaches in this course.
Pick any of these notebooks and download the notebook, plug in your data and set any relevant parameters
to meet your constraints, then run the notebook and get instructions on what to do.
Or alternatively, plug it into the API your brokerage provides.
And believe it or not, that is it.
Now, at this point, you might have some doubts.
For instance, you might ask, well, don't I have to know what the code is doing before I use it?
And the answer is no, not technically.
Remember that we do this all the time in Python, whenever you use an API or a module or a function
that you didn't build yourself.
This is what you are doing.
And in effect, what you are doing with the code in this course is treating it like an API.
When you use an API, you don't know how it works.
You just understand what inputs you should pass in and what outputs you should expect to get back.
That's the beauty of coding.
It's modular such that you can build on top of the work of others.
You don't need to implement dictionaries and lists and sets and matrix multiplication.
You just have faith that they work.
OK, so you accept that you can just treat the code like an API passing in the required inputs and getting
back the desired outputs, but then you might say, Well, actually, I don't know how to do that.
And if this is your issue, realize that this is not an issue with the notebook or with the course,
but it points to a limitation of your Python abilities if you're not able to understand how to take
a piece of existing code and make use of it.
This would suggest that you need to improve your Python skills.
This is something you should work on by yourself and note that I do this all the time.
I take code on GitHub that someone else has written, and I incorporate that into my own code.
So this is entirely a real world practical skill that any Python coder should have.
OK, so now you're at the point where you do have the ability to treat the code like an API, but you
still might have some apprehensive news.
How do you know it actually performs?
And of course, the answer is to back test.
Obviously, if you know how to use the code like an API and you know how to plug in your own data set,
then this should be very easy.
Furthermore, note that you can tweak any parameters as needed to fine tune performance.
Again, you can do this even if you don't know how the code works.
But at this point, knowing how it works might help, since you want to know what that parameter tweaking
actually does.
Still, this doesn't require a deep knowledge of math.
OK, so now you're at the point where you do have the ability to treat the CO two like an API and you
know how to test it to ensure that it works with your data and your parameters.
But at this point, you might return to your first objection.
You might say, sure, I could just play this code without thinking about how it works, but that doesn't
seem like a terribly responsible thing to do.
And thus, what you are really saying is I would like to know how this code works before I put it to
use.
But now you realize you're back at square one.
How does the code work?
Well, it works by doing math.
Luckily, we covered all that math in this course, but it does mean you would have to watch all those
pesky lectures and actually understand the math, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first
place.
So now you realize the contradiction here comes from your own mind.
You want to know how it works, but how it works is math.
But you want to avoid math, thereby also avoiding how it works.
Of course, I can't resolve this contradiction for you.
These are simply two mutually exclusive approaches which approach you pick is up to you.
But I hope you'll agree with me that what I described in this lecture is technically possible.
You can take any notebook from this course and simply plug it in, provided you are competent with Python.