The Broker Game

A friend from my university asked me a simple question. Same university, different faculty. Can we build a crypto or stock trading bot that adjusts itself to the market, to market conditions, to fundamental news, all of it on its own? It is a fair question, and a lot of people are asking it right now.

So I told him where we actually are in June 2026. We can build great trading scanners, genuinely good ones. But fully automated trading bots are still in a yes and no place. Nobody public has built one with the lowest drawdown and a real win rate. Forget 100 percent. I have not even seen a public bot hold above 50 percent reliably, and even that would be enough. Maybe the large firms have it, the high-frequency desks, but that is not something you and I can see.

Here is the core of it. We only get access to brokers who hand us an API, and that is another layer sitting between us and the real thing. If we could reach the main market layer directly, we could build something genuinely great. But we cannot, not from here. To understand that flow you almost have to work inside a large firm first. I never did, but I have connections with people who have, and they all say the same thing. It is not as simple as what we can see.

And think about who else is thinking this. We are sitting in Sri Lanka imagining a clever bot, and some founder in Silicon Valley is imagining the exact same thing. So we have to think deeper and more precisely about what we are really doing. Because this is a zero-sum game. When you trade on top of another broker, it is a broker game, not trading. It feels like a casino to me.

The strange part is how close it is to iGaming. Strip out the casino label and almost everything is the same. There is an operator, there are payments, there is KYC, all of it. iGaming and casino firms need their own regulations, and trading firms answer to different ones like CySEC, and there are many of them. The only real difference is how it reaches the public, and both worlds run on affiliates, because without them they cannot survive.

So yes, you can build on top of these companies, use their APIs, and offer a service to people. Someone with good money can occasionally make money out of it. That part is true, but it is rare, and that is exactly why I keep pulling the conversation back here. I told my friend all of this. The most dangerous part is that he has no programming experience. If you do not understand how these backends actually work, that is the red flag that you are thinking something wrong at some point. The idea might be good. But it is close to impossible the way things are set up right now.