Table of Contents

Who am I

My background

Automation as a catalyst

Time to make money with automation

Another shot at making money with automation

The switch to quantitative trading

The future

Who am I

My name is Hōrōshi, and I am the founder of Vagabond Research, an educational trading firm committed to making systematic trading accessible and easy to learn for people from all over the world. We teach clients how to build profitable trading systems from scratch, providing the necessary guidance from start to finish by focusing on making complex topics easy to understand.

Over the last few years, I have created multiple profitable Print on Demand businesses that run fully automated, which allows me to focus on further scaling by managing their capital utilizing systematic algorithmic trading systems. Besides being an entrepreneur, I hold the position of CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) at a software development firm.

I'm a freak for anything related to strategy or automation. As an amateur online poker player, I have played over 2 million No Limit Hold 'Em 6-max cash-game hands. These days, I only play Hyper Turbo Heads Up Sit n Go's on PokerStars.

I've got the hots for discretionary options trading but also enjoy playing fast-paced competitive strategy games like Starcraft 2 in my free time.

I continue to consistently rank in the Top 10 bracket of the European Diamond I league in StarCraft 2 and have even managed to hit low Masters in one season.

Learning and simplifying complex concepts has been a necessary skill that came naturally to me during my journey.

My background

Unlike most people in this field, my background isn't in finance, but in development. I am a certified Front-End, Back-End, and Full-Stack Developer, as well as a Penetration Tester (Hacker), with 8+ years of experience. However, I did not study in a traditional sense; I am entirely self-taught, and the path I took was anything but academic.

My initial motivation wasn't simply 'I want to learn to code because I want to code'. I started playing chess with my grandfather at a young age, which got me into the world of strategy games. I'd spent most of my time playing any strategy game I could get my hands on: Chess, Bridge, Scat, Doppelkopf, Durak, Poker, you name it. This often meant teaching my peers how to play, as not many children were interested in these types of games.

As I grew older, and my parents decided I was old enough to use a computer, I discovered even more strategy games! Titles like Age of Empires, StarCraft, and Warcraft 3 had me glued to the screen.

Another game that caught my attention was an ARPG called Diablo 2. Although not a strategy game, it had me running dungeons, collecting items and progressing my characters for hours on end in no time.

The grind for IST runes was real!

I guess this is where it all started, but more on that later.

With the release of World of Warcraft, I found the next big thing for me. It combined PVE grinds and a competitive PVP system to duke it out with others. The perfect combination! I was, without a doubt, one of Blizzard's biggest customers at this point.

All these games had one thing in common: the grind.

Whether it was running dungeon after dungeon, battling raid boss after raid boss, or queuing up against other ladder climbers for a fast-paced strategy match.

With anything repetitive you're naturally going to end up at automation at some point.

Automation as a catalyst

Still playing a lot of Diablo 2, despite its release over 20 years ago, I started dabbling with the idea of having a bot complete these dungeon runs for me.

But I didn't even remotely understand what a bot was, what a program is, or how to configure one to suit my needs. After weeks of installing different bots - likely alongside multiple trojans and viruses - and fiddling with their configuration files, I finally got a D2JSP bot to work.

Only to find out that botting was, in fact, "illegal" and gets you banned.

But that didn't stop me! I figured you only get banned if you get caught!

I spent hours upon hours, days and weeks learning how to code, so I could better understand a) how not to get caught and b) how to create a bot myself or at least understand what likely happens behind the scenes. After lots of effort, and with my new system in place, I spent countless hours observing the bot do runs, optimizing the routes and its behavior based on what I was seeing.

Soon, I realized that I enjoyed tinkering with this system to make it more efficient even more than grinding myself. Stepping away from the computer, letting the bot do runs for me, and then returning to reap the rewards provided a great sense of fulfillment.

Around the same time, the Moneymaker effect made the retail online poker industry boom. While my bots were running up and down the Diablo 2 ladder, I started getting back into online strategy games, this time focusing on No Limit Hold 'Em 6-Max cash-game tables at PokerStars. I was multitabling day in and day out, turning quite a profit.

Time to make money with automation

The idea of applying automation to poker quickly occurred to me, but I hit a wall almost immediately. The mathematics were straightforward because I already understood the fundamentals, but articulating it in simple (or rather complex) If-Else statements or Switches just didn't cut it.

All the possible hand combinations and scenarios required learning new coding techniques so the bot could decide what the most profitable action was for any given situation. These techniques included, but were not limited to, object-oriented programming. Once I was ready to hit the tables with my new system, I quickly managed to have a profitable bot up and running.

However, as it turns out, online poker sites have even more sophisticated automation detection techniques than the gaming industry. I began studying more evasion techniques to better conceal my bots, learning a lot about privacy and security along the way.

Just as I was finally able to evade most detection systems, disaster struck: Online poker's Black Friday nearly killed the industry. Platforms I was botting on went bankrupt or vanished. Regulation came in with a sledgehammer and made things even more complicated.

With all the knowledge I had acquired, I decided to apply for a job as a programmer. After securing an internship with a software development firm, I quickly landed my first job as a developer.

This was nice. I was being paid to do something I enjoyed!

A job as a developer is quite different from coding for yourself though. Most work hours aren't actually spent coding, but rather communicating with clients, reading and responding to emails, attending meetings, and waiting on others. Even though many of these tasks bored me, I appreciated the opportunity to learn about industry standards such as container orchestration, test-driven development, and project management in a professional environment.

Still, the idea of earning money through automation never left me.

Another shot at making money with automation

I continued to bot games and play poker in my free time while researching income streams that were supposedly passive. One of these so-called 'passive' income streams was Print on Demand. There's really nothing passive about it though, you have to work hard to identify profitable niches, understand demand, create designs, and handle shipping.

I guess what most people mean when they talk about 'passive income' is actually scalable income. You create one product to then sell it multiple times without extra effort.

I managed to create my own brand and make it profitable but it took a lot of my time to manage it, and while I learned to work with Photoshop and Illustrator, these activities did not interest me as much as coding.

I began applying the same methodology I used in all my other projects, leveraging template-based designs, automating every step of the pipeline, from research to creation and uploading. Only to again, learn that automation is frowned upon. Website crawling for keywords gets your IP banned, and automatically uploading batches of designs locks you out of your account on sites like RedBubble or Merch by Amazon quickly.

My previous efforts in learning evasion techniques once again proved useful.

It finally worked. I was making scalable, automated money!

Most products never sell, but that's not a big deal when your system creates literally thousands of them every day. Today, I run multiple profitable Print on Demand businesses and continue to create new ones.

Since I managed to free up time previously devoted to these businesses right when COVID hit, I started picking up new hobbies. One of which was trading, specifically crypto futures. Trading somehow felt like poker, but it didn't start out the same way for me; I struggled to become profitable. Even though I had a lot of experience with tilt and variance from poker, sticking to my trading plan was challenging. In hindsight, the reason is clear: I began trading patterns and moving averages without thoughts about what regimes they might work in or even backtesting my ideas.

Determined to automate trading the same way as I had done with poker, I researched everything about trading I could get my hands on so I could become profitable. During this process, I learned that automation in trading is actually legal! Corporations like hedge funds and market makers are botting the markets all day long. This was new to me. After years of learning how to stay under the radar, I had found an ecosystem where automation was tolerated.

My goal was clear and my conviction strong: I needed to get a profitable automated trading system running.

The switch to quantitative trading

After months of learning and trial and error, I finally understood why I was struggling. As I was trying to translate my trading ideas into code, I realized that I wasn't able to express all the discretionary concepts in plain English in the first place.

Like in my previous ventures, I faced new challenges. Not only did I need to learn new coding techniques for acquiring and handling large amounts of data but also lacked a lot of domain knowledge when it comes to trading. I surrounded myself with books and locked myself in my lab.

After learning about the proper anatomy of a trading strategy and how to quantitatively express my trading ideas, I realized why I was failing before. Timing entries and exits, managing risk, allocating capital accordingly, as well as backtesting my ideas before hitting the live markets and optimization were crucial components missing in my system before it could become profitable.

Though the returns from automated trading may not be as spectacular as those from discretionary trading, they were more consistent. Best of all, the automation allowed me to reclaim my time.

So once again, I found myself with more free time because my bots were doing most of the work for me. That's why I've already picked up a new hobby: writing a blog.

Don't worry though - I have no plans to automate this process and have a bunch of ChatGPT clones creating incoherent walls of text just for the sake of it like a lot of people do. I genuinely enjoy creating content myself and have no desire to saturate the internet with even more spammy articles.

To this day, I continue to explore new trading ideas and how to integrate them into my system.

The future

We've talked quite a bit about the past.

Now it's time to look forward!

I've learned a lot and learned it the hard way. I paid my dues along the way. I had to relearn things multiple times and find my way through the bushes myself. Arguably, the most significant and challenging problem I faced was the theoretical nature of educational resources. While simplified theory can aid understanding complex concepts, it's often not enough to prepare you for real-world applications.

None of this has to be difficult. It's complex.. true, but complexity only becomes an obstacle when you don't know how to approach it. I want to share what I've learned and help others on a similar journey so they can focus on learning and doing what they love, instead of wasting months figuring things out, only to start over. With step-by-step guidance, the only thing left to do is to put in the work.

If you're on this journey yourself or just interested in following mine, feel free to follow me. I'll be sharing insights and wisdom regularly.

Let's automate!