I started by learning all the buy indicators then making a spreadsheet to compare stocks based on all buy indicators then automating the data into the spreadsheet so I wasn't doing any of it manually then I worked on tweaking the spreadsheet so that it included good "timing." then I figured out bad "timing". then i made it so that the colors changes when there was good and bad timing, allowing for a "red light" "green light" system for buying. then I read the crappy documentation on the TDAmeritrade API and used the red light, green light system to send commands to TDAmeritrade to implement the trades then i rebuilt the whole thing in mySQL using python to transport the data Note: You only have to learn the math for buy indicators once, because once the database is calculating for you, you never have to come back to it.