Warning

Not production ready! Use at your own risk.

Warning

This application executes a specific trading strategy (buy your losers) that may not be right for you. I am not a financial advisor, and do not provide personal financial or investing advice.

buy_low

A tool for making automated equity purchases via the Charles Schwab Trader API.

Important

This tool has a number of external dependencies, including having a Schwab trading account, a Schwab developer account, creating a Schwab app, obtaining a refresh token, and so on.

This is an excellent "unofficial guide" to getting started with Schwab's Trader API. Please note it also makes reference to a YouTube video by Tyler Bowers and a GitHub repo.

Basic Usage

buy_low (in its current form) automates the purchase of the worst performing equity over the past 30 days in its configuration file (equities).

More detail is to be added, but in this example, at the time of the run, SCHD had performed "the worst" over the past month compared to the other equities. Therefore, an order for 12 shares (equal to or less than maximum_amount) of SCHD would be created.

Running in test mode, no orders will be placed.
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
| Equity | Starting Price | Ending Price | Percent Change |
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
| SCHD   | $77.24         | $79.23       | 2.58%          |
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
| DIA    | $382.37        | $397.20      | 3.88%          |
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
| SCHM   | $76.39         | $79.85       | 4.53%          |
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
| SCHA   | $45.95         | $48.45       | 5.44%          |
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
| QQQ    | $418.82        | $460.35      | 9.92%          |
+--------+----------------+--------------+----------------+
Worst performing equity: SCHD
Maximum amount to spend: $1000
Maximum whole shares of SCHD to purchase: 12
Current cash balance: $3093.37
Test mode, otherwise 12 shares of SCHD would be purchased.
If you're ready, run with --live
Done!

Running with --live and suitable credentials will place an order.

Configuration

buy_low is a Schwab API app and requires an app key and secret. You will find these values on your Schwab app's Details page.

The refresh token is obtained by a successful OAuth exchange with your trading account. It can be obtained by following the instructions here.

Ignore the POSTGRES_CONN_STRING, that feature hasn't been fully developed.

.env File

SCHWAB_APP_KEY=
SCHWAB_APP_SECRET=
SCHWAB_REFRESH_TOKEN=
# Optional
POSTGRES_CONN_STRING=

buy_low.toml

What equities are you interested in purchasing? How much are you willing to invest per invocation?

# Maximum amount (in dollars) to use for trading
maximum_amount = 1000

# Equities to trade
equities = ['SCHD', 'DIA', 'QQQ', 'SCHA']

Wish List

Things I'd like to add:

• Saving the order information to Postgres so I visualize transactions later on with a tool like Grafana
• Perhaps allow for different trading strategies such as "buying the latest winner" or a portfolio rebalancer