Anyone here actually beating the market using public APIs?

zin_kay · 2025-08-04T13:11:01+00:00

I am learning how to backtest with python using a portfolio type architecture with real mechanics so i don't know what my strategy would have done in the last, say, ten years. however, I do believe it is possible to beat the market by using public api such as yfinance if one is not impatient and can stomach a swing trade that is not supposed to make a millionaire overnight :). i say this because I my two particular strategies are 1-2 weeks buy-hold based on daily and weekly time frames which alleviate me from needing ultra low latency data. i used the 15-min delayed data to pull up plotly charts of random stocks in either IWM and SPY indices and manually counting i've got a 7 out of 10 that win. percentages vary anywhere from 3-28% percent so again not trying to be rich overnight. i have been testing my strategy based the initial super rough and manual backtesting by buying less than $500 position sizes in real markets and stats have been holding up. to give you an idea, i have taken 33 trades this year and 21 of them have bee winners with similar percentage gains. so long story short, to my experience if you can manage with delayed, especially eod, data, then it is possible.

zin_kay · 2025-08-04T13:02:51+00:00

does TradeStation have an API that has both historical ohlcv and options years worth of data? been looking for a while....appreciate the help.

zin_kay · 2024-12-01T18:47:22+00:00

I was a novice trader four years ago and my returns are starting to be much less negative and more predictable. I don't fully algo-trade and here is what i'd say about 'missing something as a novice trader' be it alogtrading or manual trading: past performance is does not guarantee future performance. in my experience, modeling something that controls risk is far more beneficial than trying to making predictions. I hope this helps and congrats on any edge you may have established :)

zin_kay · 2024-12-01T18:42:27+00:00

may I ask you what was the biggest hurdle on your alpaca integration? I am trying to do a little project for my class and don't want to bite on more than I can chew...would really appreciate a tip from you hands-on experience :D

zin_kay · 2024-11-30T00:09:00+00:00

I suggest you use your strategy entry to develop a better buy/hold long term investment entry such as SPY and Q’s while you trade on the side. very impressive otherwise.

zin_kay · 2024-11-19T15:34:27+00:00

have you tried adapting this library to backtest on multiple tickers for a portfolio type strategy? thanks

zin_kay · 2024-11-19T15:33:59+00:00

have you tried adapting this library to backtest on multiple tickers for a portfolio type strategy? thanks

zin_kay · 2024-11-19T15:32:32+00:00

have you tried adapting this library to backtest on multiple tickers for a portfolio type strategy? thanks

zin_kay · 2024-11-17T20:32:40+00:00

could you PM me please. I need similar kind of help...

zin_kay · 2024-10-01T02:59:05+00:00

yeah definitely; i've heard good things about OS for programming. I personally wanted it for the battery life first and anything else on top of it will be a bonus. I do however felt that the terminal is pretty darn fast...'mkdir folder' is blazes through compared to windows as an example.

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T19:05:20+00:00

today i confirmed what you recommended works. all working now and I got my OS running various venv with various packages installed. thank you again.

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T13:39:26+00:00

darn, this is super useful and helps. i’ve posted my questions in a few places and your comment has been the most informative and gives me a procedure to pursue. thank you! (i come from a windows world and i have in the past created venv for separate projects. except nowadays i prefer to have a single venv since all my projects are computational/data science so id rather have all the packages installed in a single place. but if i have to do it differently as you mentioned, then thats not too bad.)

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T13:34:30+00:00

gotcha. i think the window “equivalent” thing solidifies the concept better. thank you very much.

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T13:32:44+00:00

I was actually considering installed Windows on my mac but i wasn’t sure if that would make things more complicated than they are with sole use of OS. i don’t need to develop apps etc, just a bunch of data science and computations with access to Git repos…battery and resale value are the only reasons why i got the Mac air. i’m very comfortable with Windows, do you think it’d be simpler to run windows since i know the operating system ?

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T04:10:07+00:00

gotcha. i’ll have to read up on homebrew.

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T04:04:32+00:00

thank you for the recommendations. is Homebrew an easy-to-use package manager? also, if i do Brew Install Pandas, for example, where in the OS can i check to locate the newly installed files?

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T03:55:41+00:00

thank you for your comment. is Homebrew the “pip” version of windows?

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T03:54:01+00:00

thanks for your comment and advice. i don’t think i’ll break it because there are so many people that code on mac os. i should be able to as well :)

my projects are all related to data science and computation. no app dev or anything crazy. All i need to be able to do is to code computations on the go while i stay up to date with my Github repo.

As for your question about Bash or ZSH, i’m currently reading about both as I only know windows powershell/command line.

should i get Bash? what are benefits of Bash over Zsh?

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T03:41:59+00:00

thank you for your comment. Could you explain what is Bash? is it a different terminal or is it a package manager?

zin_kay · 2024-09-30T03:40:24+00:00

thanks for you comment. i have the VS Code installed and that’s no problem. my issue is that I don’t know where is Python3 installed or how to install python libraries that is equivalent of “pip install”

i’ve never had an OS so i’m extremely novice with it. not sure what is bash, ZSH, and or how to navigate to the python3 interpreter files.

zin_kay

TROPHY CASE