Cost to start a retail algorithmic trading

[lupoalberto]

Hi, a brief description of mine (forgive me for my not perfect english).
I've a good grasp of finance (almost graduate in finance), and i've been coding in python for 5 months almost full time. Now i'm studying the Anaconda environment in order to work with data in finance.
Now i'm following the Quantopian material mainly because they use Python and it seems a very good site.
I'm reading a lot about algorithmic trading but i don't understand exactly how much it is in order to start the algo trading environment.
Can i have an idea about how much are the fixed annual costs to run a retail algo trading environment?
Which can be a minimum initial amount of capital for a beginner who have no experience in real trading?
My goal is not to become rich: i'm here because i like the problem solving world applied to finance.
My goal is to learn algo trading without initial losses.
I know that the learning curve to earn money is long...
Thank you

 

[outlier]

Lupo,

Can i have an idea about how much are the fixed annual costs to run a retail algo trading environment?

Fixed should be everything, except 3rd party fees, e.g. broker, VPS, charting software, data feed...

Which can be a minimum initial amount of capital for a beginner who have no experience in real trading?

This depends on your risk mgmt, the asset your trading, brokers initial and call margin reqs, the type of strategy your trading, with that in mind, its based of a position sizing formula.

My goal is not to become rich: i'm here because i like the problem solving world applied to finance.
My goal is to learn algo trading without initial losses.
I know that the learning curve to earn money is long...

There is no learning to trade without losses. You write that your goal is not to become rich, yet implying it in your last sentence.

I would also suggest that you take your thread seriously by using good punctuation, spelling and grammar. This will also increase the probability that someone will read your question.

 

[daleholborow]

There will always be the cost of losses as you learn, but I encourage you strongly to investigate backtesting BEFORE you start trading. And also, don't learn trading, study *investing*

Read the books by Michael Halls Moore, and his articles. While I am personally quite opposed to "trading", his books and articles on the topic are quite good, especially the ones about "when should you write your own backtesting engine" and "event driven trading engines in python".

I only found this last Odin code night, but the code looks clean and decent (from a very very quick look, and I also don't personally use Python at the moment), but he also mentions MHM as an inspiration, so that's probably a good start.

JamesBrofos/Odin

Event-Driven Backtesting with Python - Part I | QuantStart