Hello, my name is Phil, I work at an aerospace manufacturing company where we produce parts for jet engines.

A little background about me; in 2007 I got my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. I worked at a few companies over the years, always in an engineering role. By 2014, I realized there were a lot more ideas out there that influenced the world, and my tech background wasn’t quite enough to appreciate it all. I wanted to learn about the business concepts that gave support to enterprise and essentially funded the sciences, so I went to night school to get my MBA. Fast-forward to 2017 and I had gotten into stocks and valuations. Within 3 months I had lost half of my trading account, so I started looking for training programs.

I found Quantra on a google search but skipped over it. I was looking for python training content for free and found it eventually. There was one problem though; programming isn’t easy to learn, and after hours of memorizing free code, I was still lost and couldn’t make anything work. I was trying to self-teach like I did in the past, but it didn’t work with programming. Someone had to walk me through it.

So, I came back to Quantra and saw the videos, the Jupiter notebooks, the coding exercises, and the code files. I was sold on the user experience. The mix of teaching methods helps keep your attention a lot better, and it saves you from being stuck in trial-and-error programming forever. I’ve learned more about programming in a couple weeks than I have in the last 3 years.

I can only speak from an engineer’s point of view, but I believe there is tremendous value in the content offered on Quantra, especially now during this stay-at-home situation. When I lost money in my trading account it was always due to emotions. I had good ideas but couldn’t stick with the plan. Algos execute your trade logic perfectly, so you can really tune your strategy and see what works or doesn’t work.

I’ve been on one of the Quantra learning tracks and I’m trying to get through the material as fast as I can. I’m hoping to write a custom multi-indicator algo with money mgmt and get it online while this market volatility is still around. If it all works out, I may even trade money for other people and start my own algorithmic trading desk.

My advice to others who are willing to learn algo trading is that if you don’t have programming knowledge, learning about programming can be pretty dry. If you alternate between trading-focused and python-focused courses, it will keep your momentum up and you won't lose interest. But before doing anything of this, make sure you have your wife’s permission!