I Do Not Speak Python… And That Is Okay
On this episode of Line Your Own Pockets
Confession time: I know nothing about Python.
I am not secretly running Jupyter notebooks at night. I am not three YouTube tutorials away from rewriting my whole trading stack. When people start arguing about pandas versus NumPy, I quietly back out of the room and go back to my charts.
That is exactly why I lean so hard on Dave when it comes to the “Python versus Amibroker” debate. Dave has lived on the developer side. He gets the lure of using the language you already know for everything. And even he is saying, “Friends do not let friends backtest in Python.”
From my side of the screen, this is a simple story about tools.
If I need to hang a picture, I do not reach for a multitool that also has a corkscrew, nail file, USB drive, and bottle opener. I grab a real drill, put a real bit in it, and get the job done. The multitool lives in the glove box for emergencies.
Amibroker is that power tool. It is built for one job: chew through bar data and backtest trading ideas as fast and clean as possible. I do not need it to build websites or scrape Twitter. I need it to tell me whether a mean reversion idea on mid caps with a three day hold and overnight edge is worth real risk.
That is also why I walked away from the seductive idea of “I should really learn Python first.” I do not want to become a part time software engineer. I want to become a better trader. Every hour I spend fighting environments, packages, and syntax is an hour I am not testing, refining, or trading a system.
So I let Dave be the Python guy, and I focus on using a purpose built engine that lets me go from idea to tested strategy quickly. That is the job. The language under the hood is just plumbing.
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