no not algo trading; sorry if my post was unclear. To clarify, by long term investors, I don’t necessarily mean long term investments. And when I say traders, I really mean day traders.
I am thinking of the retail long term investor who is stepping outside the safety of mutual funds; looking to embark on their quest to generate outsized returns by direct exposure to stocks. This is what I refer to as the modern retail hobbyist investor.
My anecdotal observation is that there is a large section of such people who participate in the market without really knowing what to do; and are turn away when things go south.
They could use better tooling to help them with -
risks to consider while buying something.
when to consider selling something they hold; profit taking opportunities.
prompts to consider rebalancing. e.g. overweight on smallcaps etc…
To be able to build any form of this that will scrutinise trades and decisions with information; will require context on an investors holdings; this means apis. This appears to be in conflict with algo trading concerns.
Maybe there is a space for a conversation on opening up api’s in a way that doesn’t also let algo trading in.
2 category of investors, those that know what they are doing & those that don’t.
For the latter, the mathematics of reading quarterly statements, doing fundamental analysis / sectoral analysis / technical analysis / stage analysis to be able to make good decisions is hard / time consuming. Technology is required.
How do I know when I am overweight on a sector ? - I would need access to an api with my holdings.
How do I know when I am buying into a sector that has tailwinds? - would need something to warn me of the risks. e.g. chemicals a few months ago; but it has to be at the point of sale.
How do I know when I it is a good time for me to book some profits on some of my holdings ? Again api access to holdings combined with stage analysis etc…
How do I know if I am Buying into a stock that has weaker relative strength in the sector ? Again, I would need a trigger at the point of sale.
How do I know when there are tax loss harvesting opportunities that come up ? e.g. HDFC Bank - want to stay invested but opportunity to harvest some losses.
These can be done manually, also most are available on console insights/streak etc. There will be very few people who are proficient in both fundamentals and in technology. News related items are not available on Kite API.
This is known. News related items can be obtained from news related APIs. What is required is a holdings readonly api, and what particulars of the holdings.
For the hobbyist investor, doing this stuff manually across different sources of information is like programming without co-pilot nowadays.
that leads to a manual experience and therefore usability is a problem. As a broker, it makes sense for zerodha to not have opinions on trades; but a third party could build an experience that seamlessly integrates into the point of sale for a trade
Please … be it API or manually looking at the console - both result in the same insight no ?
If you are a programmer and would want to write your App using the API , may be it does make sense but not all investors are programmers and not all of us want to bear AWS API costs as brokerage .
Do consider, many things may be possible; people tend do whatever is easy; act without information etc… an example of this this article quoting Nitin For the sake of simplicity let us ignore cost for now and trust that this can become efficient over time and focus on direction.
For me to manually look at console; trading view, screener and make better portfolio decisions, I would require quite a bit more time than 2-3 hours a week I can afford as a hobbyist investor. That is, if I knew what to look for and knew what I was doing.
Tooling is everything for any kind of efficient and accurate work. Prevents basic mistakes. A programmer uses a compiler, linter etc…, none of these would be possible without programmatic interfaces. Trading should too. I for one am convinced that tooling is the future of trading; the aim here is to close the gap b/w professional and hobbyist investors. To me its not a question of if but when. Zerodha’s dogma on api’s; is a bit of a damp squib and hopefully there are fresh deliberations here. In the end, a better equipped investor is in the interest of the platform and to that end this discussion is directionally foundational.
Hi,
I really use the function of sort by Trigger in Kite Desktop. However in mobile, sort by trigger isn’t available. Could we please get it if that’s not too much of a trouble?