This is actually great... You do not need a formal education to be great at this... I am a bit nostalgic and envy you for what is in front of you: a great challenge, but well worth it in the end...

Having FY money is the greatest freedom one can ask for!

I dont even want "FY" money. I want to see my code make the "FY" money.

Exactly, this is the name of the game: the best lifestyle businesses with no customers, employees or investors... host it in the cloud and you will be truly location independent... personally I am checking the logs of my systems once a week to make sure everything is working as designed + 3rd party monitoring service to monitor the servers and the API responses and all is set!

How would someone get started doing what you do with an automated trading system?

get as much data as you can find and start back testing all trading ideas you can come up with... sooner or later you'll find something that works for you, the most important part of the back testing is to back test for at least 1 market cycle, the more market cycles, the more robust system you'll have...

After that it is easy to convert the code and build the trading robot, now every discount broker is offering API for automated trading...

Ideas on where one can get viable data?

I've heard good things about Quandl, especially if you're willing to foot the bill for some of their premium datasets.

https://www.quandl.com/

Cheapest I can find for 20+ years us stock market data, was on eBay for $100

I would have never thought of that. Do you have any info on making a trading bot?

I am always on a look out for data... On how to build the bot, the best documentation would be your discount broker API, here is IB for example... From here the sky is the limit...

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=5041

Thanks. I don't see an e-mail in your profile, but mine is in my profile. If you want to continue this conversation, hit me up.

Can you share how much computing power is needed to have a bot (or several) automating trading?

Not much to be frank, as this is not a HFT related, so basically any linux VPS will do, (I have a few around the world for redundancy)

and if it becomes an HFT situation?

for HFT, you'll need millions for infrastructure, co locating servers in the stock exchanges, etc... definitely not one man life style business...

Isn't this data the same one can get from Yahoo Finance?

Not anymore, the yahoo finance is unfortunately broken...

I have it working pulling historical data based on symbol

Sure, but there are maybe over 10000 companies including non existing ones and you need them all for your back testing to be valid...

I see your point. Scripting this and running on cron could help.

Make sure the delisted companies are included...