I have wanted to learn ML for a while but finally started learning hard core when I saw a former co-worker predict the price of Bitcoin. I decided to make a goal for myself, predict whether or not the stock ticker VIX was going to go up the following day.
My Dad has been day trading and intra trading stocks for many years, but I have never had any interest in stocks as I didn't understand them. This past year that changed I started learning everything I could about trend trading stocks in October of 2018. In December I took $2,000 and put it into my UStocktrade account https://www.ustocktrade.com/ ( I have no affiliation ) and haven't looked back.
Though I've had trading setbacks (losing 16% in my first month ), I have regained all of my losses and am up over 9% for my total account. I have tried several different approaches and strategies for trading stocks. Currently I like trading the VIX ( fear in the market ) and SVXY ( the inverse of the VIX ). Basically you play the stocks like a yo-yo, one goes up the other goes down.
Long story short I have been reading charts, news, and guessing as to when I think the VIX will spike ( bad news in the world, Fed announcements, etc ). This has worked well enough, but I wanted to find a way to give myself an advantage.
This gave me the perfect side project and motivation to learn ML for real. Having something I am passionate about would only help me to push through any ML challenges I would face. I did a lot of research online and finally signed up for Elite Data Science's paid course here:
https://academy.elitedatascience.com/ ( NOTE: I have no affiliation, and make no money from suggesting them ).
The course was simply amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn ML in the shortest amount of time possible! As part of the course you build several ML models and learn solid ML concepts. The final part of the course is your capstone project. I decided to make my current VIX prediction problem as my final capstone project.
I am not done with the VIX ML model but am more than halfway done. I demoed what I had made to a local AI/Deep Learning group yesterday and was encouraged by all of the positive feedback ( I am my own worst critic ). I have set a goal to have the VIX ML model done by the end of May. I'll let you know how it goes in June :-)
This is what is so fun and amazing about learning to code! When you know the basics of coding, the sky is literally the limit, you can be a developer, a QA, Test Automation Engineer, or become a Machine Learning Engineer. I have fallen in love with Python even more than I was with Ruby, and also love using Anaconda with Jupyter notebooks.
Keep learning, never give up, press through any and all challenges, learning to code is worth all of the effort!
