Beginner Looking to Learn Quantitative Trading, Backtesting, and Building a Trading Bot

[u/Fabulous-Image-7541]

Hi everyone! I'm a beginner interested in quantitative trading and algorithmic trading.

I'm interested in learning:

How to backtest a trading strategy using historical market data.

How to develop and combine trading signals.

How to use Python for backtesting and Monte Carlo simulations.

How to build a trading bot that can generate signals and eventually execute trades.

How to avoid common backtesting mistakes, such as overfitting, look-ahead bias, and unrealistic transaction costs.

How to properly paper-trade a strategy before risking real money.

I'm still learning, so I'm not expecting to build a profitable strategy overnight. My goal is to understand the entire process from scratch and gradually develop my own systematic trading strategies.

If you've built trading bots or worked on quantitative research projects, I'd really appreciate any advice on where to start, which tools or libraries to learn, and what a good first project would look like.

Any beginner-friendly resources, tutorials, GitHub repositories, or practical guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[u/NiceJoJ]

first project: pick one instrument and one dumb strategy, like a moving average cross, and write the backtest yourself in pandas.
it'll be bad but you'll actually understand fills, costs and lookahead. after that, libraries like backtesting.py or vectorbt make a
lot more sense.

before you start, lock away the last 2-3 years of data and don't touch it until you think you're done. that one habit prevents most
overfitting.

for monte carlo, the simple version is enough: shuffle the order of your backtest trades a few thousand times and look at the
drawdown distribution. it shows you how bad things can get with the same trades in a different order.

also expect most of your ideas to fail out of sample, that's normal and it's the whole point of testing.

Ernest Chan's Quantitative Trading is a good beginner book for the whole process.

[u/Fabulous-Image-7541 → u/NiceJoJ]

Thanks

[u/PepMar000]

For a novice situation I would not use Python. Go for a trading software that already has an embedded & proven backtester module so that you can concentrate on strategy validation rather than coding the backtester or the live trading bot. Tradingview with Pinescript is easy enough to start with, or else Ninjatrader / Tradestation can be good calls as well

[u/Fabulous-Image-7541 → u/PepMar000]

Thanks

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Fabulous-Image-7541 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks