Spent the last few years bouncing between two worlds — writing code and reading charts — and the thing that clicked for me: 95% of retail traders can explain RSI or a moving average crossover, but almost none of them can turn that idea into something that actually runs while they sleep.

The reason isn't that coding is hard. It's that trading courses teach trading, and coding courses teach coding, and nobody ever puts them in the same room. So you end up with traders who have great ideas and no way to test them at scale, and coders who can build anything but don't know what's worth building.

A few things I've learned building on both sides:

• Backtesting by hand in a spreadsheet will lie to you. You need code to remove your own bias from the results.

• AI coding tools (Copilot-style) have made the technical barrier almost irrelevant — you don't need a CS degree to write a working strategy script anymore, you need to know what questions to ask.

• The traders who actually get consistent aren't the ones with the best strategy. They're the ones who can iterate on a strategy fast, because they built the tooling to test 50 ideas in a weekend instead of 1.

If you're a trader who's never coded, or a coder who's never traded — that gap is exactly where the leverage is right now. Happy to answer questions on either side in the comments.