day 1 - first 3 months

with an interest in number manipulation, databases, finance and beating systems, I have set about doing all 4 - this is the story of my journey

trading, that sounds interesting. a little digging and the next thing I know I am developing a system and buying a server.

so...

lets have some fun with the stock market, all indicators point to this being the biggest game in town

it seems that this game is where you pick a company, buy some stock in said company and watch while either the value of your stock increases or doesn't - the first stage of this process is the choosing of the company stock, and where I start

anyone who has tried to stock pick knows it is not easy, random picking works randomly, which means that there has to be a system.

the premise is that money can be made from stocks and that the system is geared in some way making this possible - there is no point in carrying on if this is not true -
if the premise is true then we can get data, manipulate it, report on it to pick stocks with certain indicators/patterns and trade

dont want to get bogged down with the due diligence although some has to be done - this is not the point and as a black art as stock picking itself and highly dependent on market sentiment - I have heard of systems tracking posts on forums, texts and news reports looking for company names and then calculating the overall tone of the post to indicate sentiment - this is not what this is about but I am not discounting it in the future.

its a game, ok with real money but still a game, a serious game.

and so to set up...

what is available data wise ?
seems that easy to get data is stock close, open, high, low and vol at the end of a day
(I am looking at stocks only at the moment, options and derivatives will come later as will shorting - at the moment keeping it simple and going long on (buying) equity only)
there is other information available but I have to start somewhere.

what indicators are out there - indicators that tell us how a stock is doing ?
I have chosen:
psar, vi, adx, st, macd and rsi - Wikipedia, yey - all will be explained - there are others, I have chosen these for the moment
psar is interesting as this is the one indicator that tries to look into the future whilst the others are looking at the past. remember the name... parabolic sar

how about another goal ? 1 million, 1 year, from 10,000 which equates to approx 2% per day compound - surely this is possible ? on 2% this gets interesting at about day 90 when funds reach about 50,000

my system... I like oracle. I like unix and windows. unix for the server (oracle enterprise linux), windows 7 and ubuntu for the laptop for testing
the server is currently a 12 core Xeon with 24Gb ram and ssds, lots of fans and lots of noise, and a ups;
the laptop is an i7, dual boot win7 and ubuntu and gets very hot when in full calc mode
downloaded data manipulated with sed and awk, scheduled with crontab, and uploaded to the database, validated and then the calcs start, all in the evening over night...

buying stock... a First Direct sharedealing account seems a fair place to start, internet based - there is stamp duty and trading costs, must remember to add these to the 2% per day.

being uk based I look at LSE and see where data is out there - first land on google finance.
create script (wget) to download all data via http from all companies each evening... I guess google does not like to be whacked and found data missing and a rather nice error message saying that google thinks that the ip address is up to no good and has decided not to send, reeks havoc with my calcs. the exact same thing then happens with yahoo finance
need a reliable source of end of day (eod) data - a quick search and 25 a month later I have a regular feed of eod data, and ftp access, yey.

so the scene is set...