Getting Started with the Interactive Brokers Native API

Here at Robot Wealth, we trade with Interactive Brokers (IB) primarily because they offer access to global markets at a reasonable price. In recent times, IB has put some time and effort into upping its tech game, including development of an API for interacting with its desktop trading applications. An application that interacts with IB’s …

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How to Connect Google Colab to a Local Jupyter Runtime

Colaboratory, or Colab, is a hosted Jupyter notebook service requiring zero setup and providing free access to compute resources. It is a convenient and powerful way to share research, and we use it extensively in The Lab. What’s The Lab? The Lab is the RW Pro group’s portal for doing collaborative research together as a …

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Why We Use Apache Beam For Our Systematic Trading Data Pipeline

In the world of Big Data, there are lots of tools and technologies to choose from. Choosing the “right” one depends on the things that you are building and the problems you are trying to solve. Trading firms have skilled teams that monitor and deploy data pipelines for their organisation and the technical overhead that …

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Using Apache Airflow to Extract CoT Data

In today’s post we are going to be extracting CoT (Commitment of Traders) reports from the CFTC website using a pipeline built on Apache Airflow. What is CoT data? The CoT report is a weekly publication which reports the open positions of market participants in the U.S futures market. It’s published every Friday at 3:30 …

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Simulating Variable FX Swaps in Zorro and Python

One of the ongoing research projects inside the Robot Wealth community involves an FX strategy with some multi-week hold periods. Such a strategy can be significantly impacted by the swap, or the cost of financing the position. These costs change over time, and we decided that for the sake of more accurate simulations, we would …

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Fun with the Cryptocompare API

Cryptocompare is a platform providing data and insights on pretty much everything in the crypto-sphere, from market data for cryptocurrencies to comparisons of the various crytpo-exchanges, to recommendations for where to spend your crypto assets. The user-experience is quite pleasant, as you can see from the screenshot of their real-time coin comparison table: As nice …

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Demystifying the Hurst Exponent – Part 2

What if you had a tool that could help you decide when to apply mean reversion strategies and when to apply momentum to a particular time series? That’s the promise of the Hurst exponent, which helps characterise a time series as mean reverting, trending, or a random walk. For a brief introduction to Hurst, including …

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