The Quest Begins (The "Why")
Honestly, I was tired of staring at candlestick charts while my coffee went cold. I kept thinking, “What if I could automate the boring parts and let the machine do the heavy lifting while I focus on strategy?” It started as a lazy Sunday experiment—just a script that pulled the latest price for AAPL and printed it to the console. When I saw that number update in real‑time, I felt a tiny rush, like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix for the first time. That moment sparked the question: Can I turn this into a real trading bot that actually places orders? The dragon I wanted to slay was the endless manual monitoring and the fear of missing a move because I blinked.
The Revelation (The Insight)
The big “aha!” came when I stopped trying to build a monolithic script that did everything at once. Instead, I broke the bot into three clear layers:
Data fetcher – pulls market data from a reliable API (I used Alpaca’s free tier for paper trading).
