TradingBot

This is an attempt to create an autonomous market trading script using the IG REST API and any other available data source for market prices.

TradingBot is meant to be a "forever running" process that keeps analysing the markets taking actions whether some conditions are met. It is halfway from an academic project and a real useful piece of software, I guess I will see how it goes :)

The main goal of this project is to provide the capability to write a custom trading strategy with minimal effort. TradingBot handles all the boring stuff.

Dependencies

• Python 3.10+
• UV (only for development)
• Docker (optional)

Install

Clone this repo and install TradingBot by running the following command from the repository root folder

make install-system

Setup

Login to your IG Index dashboard

• Obtain an API KEY from the settings panel
• If using the demo account, create demo credentials
• Take note of your spread betting account ID (demo or real)
• (Optional) Visit AlphaVantage website: https://www.alphavantage.co and request a free api key
• Insert these info in a file called .credentials

This must be in json format

{
    "username": "username",
    "password": "password",
    "api_key": "apikey",
    "account_id": "accountId",
    "av_api_key": "apiKey"
}

• Copy the .credentials file into the ${HOME}/.TradingBot/config folder
• Revoke permissions to read the file from other users

cd config
sudo chmod 600 ${HOME}/.TradingBot/config/.credentials

Market source

There are different ways to define which markets to analyse with TradinbgBot. You can select your preferred option in the configuration file under the market_source section:

• Local file

You can create a file epic_ids.txt containg IG epics of the companies you want to monitor. You need to copy this file into the ${HOME}/.TradingBot/data folder.

• Watchlist

You can use an IG watchlist, TradingBot will analyse every market added to the selected watchlist

• API

TradingBot navigates the IG markets dynamically using the available API call to fetch epic ids.

Configuration file

The configuration file is in the config folder and it contains several configurable parameter to personalise how TradingBot work. It is important to setup this file appropriately in order to avoid unexpected behaviours.

Start TradingBot

You can start TradingBot with

trading_bot

Close all the open positions

trading_bot --close-positions [-c]

Uninstall

You can use pip to uninstall TradingBot:

sudo pip3 uninstall TradingBot

Development

The Makefile is the entrypoint for any development action. uv handles the dependency management and the pyproject.toml contains the required python packages.

Install uv and create the virtual environment:

cd /path/to/repository
make install

Test

You can run the test from the workspace with:

make test

Documentation

The Sphinx documentation contains further details about each TradingBot module with source code documentation of each class member. Explanation is provided regarding how to create your own Strategy and how to integrate it with the system.

Read the documentation at:

https://tradingbot.readthedocs.io

You can build it locally with:

make docs

The generated html files will be in docs/_build/html.

Docker

You can run TradingBot in a Docker container.

The Docker images are configured with a default TradingBot configuration and it does not have any .credentials files. You must mount these files when running the Docker container

Pull

The Docker images are available in the official Docker Hub. Currently TradingBot supports both amd64 and arm64 architectures. You can pull the Docker image directly from the Docker Hub. Latest version:

docker pull ilcardella/tradingbot:latest

Build

You can build the Docker image yourself using the Dockerfile in the docker folder:

cd /path/to/repo
make docker

Run

As mentioned above, it's important that you configure TradingBot before starting it. Once the image is available you can run TradingBot in a Docker container mounting the configuration files:

docker run -d \
    -v /path/to/trading_bot.toml:/.TradingBot/config/trading_bot.toml \
    -v /path/to/.credentials:/.TradingBot/config/.credentials \
    tradingbot:latest

You can also mount the log folder to store the logs on the host adding -v /host/folder:/.TradingBot/log