Many years ago I wrote a tradebot for the forex. It's been pretty basic though. It pretty much worked by creating a bunch of polynomials, which represented the (smoothed and averaged) course history of different spans of time. You know, last minute, last 5 minutes, last 15 minutes, and so on, up to the last several days. Then I decided, if at the current point those polynomials are going up or down, and depending upon how many of those polynomials were going up or down, small buy or sell calls were made, so that my portfolio was kinda crawling behind the curve. It actually worked for scalping and daytrading. Well, I was young by then, and at some point I lost interest. One thing I've noticed however is, that movement almost always happens at certain times of the day, like when the exchange in new york opens, and stuff like that. So I guessed, that it would be reasonable for traders to find out what those times and dates are, put them in a calendar, and browse through the news before that to see what has happened that might influence the markets, and put out some call just before the exchange opens, and cash out an hour later, and then be done for the day.