To reach our goal of “casually living”, we first take a few steps and make some effort to ensure that we can live comfortably in the future. One of the most important things to consider is our money.
We have already talked about our approach to handling our finances, budgeting, and how to spend money smartly. The other aspect of “casual finance” is how to have money work smartly for you. We will talk about how we invest our money in future posts, but the main topic here is automated trading.
Sounds too complicated? Too technical? Not enough time? Don’t be turned away. We certainly felt a little bit of hesitation before starting this. But I am so glad that we followed through.
Here’s how it started… We spend so much time at work, generating revenue for our employer, whereas our money is being lazy; it’s just sitting there in the bank in our checking or savings account, but the bank is using it to generate more money for themselves.
So why can’t we do the same?
It is pretty common for people to play on the stock market, trade some stocks here and there, and maybe even get some profit. Unfortunately, you have to monitor your trades at work and not everyone has time for that… we certainly don’t. And it becomes tiring over time, since you have added more stress on top of the usual work stress. After a couple of months of some stock trading while at work, it just became too much too handle.
But you need to have your money working for you all the time, even while you’re at work. So we did some research and found that it’s actually not that difficult to setup a trading program. There is a huge number of resources (listed below) available to help us on our journey, depending on if you want to use existing programs or build one yourself.
We were pretty confident in coding our simple trading strategy. If we are able to write down our decision-making on paper, then surely we can code it. And so that’s what we did.
Ever since that day a few months ago, we have become more and more involved in automated trading. Right now, during the coronavirus pandemic, there is a lot of free time available to us and we cannot afford to not use this time wisely. We hope to be ready by the time we go back to the office.
We will post weekly updates on our progress towards automated trading and what we have learned. A link will be provided below to the first update once it has been published.
Resources: