A Beginner Question - trading only $2500?

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posted Sep 3, 2015

I have gone through a lot of posts in the community section of this website; however, it was fairly difficult to find a few of the answers to my questions. For some background, I have been trading stocks for about 4 years and am currently a college student with some knowledge on computer science and economics. Right now, I am transferring most of the money from my Scottrade to Robinhood account due to the relatively large commisions that are eating away at my gains.

-- Is algo trading viable considering I only have $2,500 to trade?

11 responses

Blue Seahawk

Sep 3, 2015

Try calling Interactive Brokers and ask, and see what they say for solely algorithmic.
Or you can see how the addition of E*Trade is progressing, $500 minimum, higher commissions.
https://www.quantopian.com/posts/do-you-want-to-connect-your-e-star-trade-account-to-quantopian-join-our-pilot-program
more

Alisa Deychman

Sep 4, 2015

Welcome Jason! You can trade using your capital amount, it will simply be a lower-frequency algorithm to minimize the transaction costs. For example, you might rebalance monthly. You can use the research environment to simulate the impact of commissions on your returns.

Here is a webinar walking through how to develop a trading strategy and deploying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNkvHEbVt0s

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Jason Kim

Sep 4, 2015

Thanks. This is an awesome community. It's fun to just learn this stuff.

Ben Kroop

Sep 9, 2015

Hi Jason,

I just published a Python package that will allow you to make commission-free algorithmic trades using Robinhood's API: https://github.com/benkroop/robinhood

You don't need beta API access to use this. This package uses the same API endpoints the phone app uses and authenticates using your normal username and password.

Edit: Looks like this probably won't work with zipline, but there are other open source packages out there that can run real-time stock trading algorithms.

Although this doesn't work inside of Quantopian, you may be able to live trade your Quantopian algorithms on Robinhood using Quantopian's Zipline library, which you can use to to run your algorithms on your local machine: https://github.com/quantopian/zipline

If it works, I'm planning to write up a tutorial in the next day or two explaining how to run your algorithm with commission-free trades on Robinhood using Quantopian/Zipline

Let me know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

Edit: Testing compatibility now

Lucas Silva

Sep 9, 2015

no you need at least 30k to expect any good result. 25 is min day-trading so you need to add something on top of it. as soon as you fall below 25k your broker will lock your account and break your algo.

Josh Payne

Sep 9, 2015

That all depends on the frequency of trading in your algo, no?

Disclaimer

Lucas Silva

Sep 9, 2015

If you don't trade enough you will always pay the max commission and also need to pay for data feed since you don't generate enough to get the free data and you will pay like 30 to 50$ just to have the IB account in a couple of month you will be down hard.