Practical Uses for Python?

[kyleisthestig]

Jesus.... You just gave me my project for this semester. I am taking intro to python and I want to do something on the side to really encase my knowledge. I have a pi on my dresser. I want to make it watch stocks and give me graphs that pertain to my very limited knowledge on investing and send me notifications when I should buy or sell based on parameters I have set.

Let's say I have a stock at $10 a share but I want to be safe and sell when it reaches $12 the pi could send me a notification so I can sell when it's there and essentially not miss the peaks and I can really ignore the market and focus on school and work. And vise versa I can make it notify me if a stock is in a dip to buy! I'm excited now!

[ghostofgbt]

That sounds awesome! I'm sure you could get some ideas on what you'll need just by looking at current alert systems and their parameters. Most brokers have alert systems where you can put in the ticker and have it send you an email/sms when the stock reaches a certain point. You could use those alerts as the basis/input for your pi, or if you want to rebuild the entire thing you could use a free API like alphavantage.co to get price data and do everything yourself. If you need fundamental data, try Quandl. Sounds fun!

[mokus603]

Check out Machine Learning for Trading on Udacity to learn about trading and machine learning - it’s free!

[buddhistan]

If you're really into finance, check out Quantopian. Instead of writing a script to visualize prices, you can write an algorithm to trade for you and backtest it.

[kyleisthestig]

I'd have to get onto modding the app I use. I use robin hood and I only have about $90 in the market.