As we approach the end of the term and the end of my time as a student at the Oregon State University, it’s fun to look back and see the progress. When I started this program in the Spring of 2020, the world was just beginning to shut down for the Covid19 pandemic. I knew very little about coding, having only taken an intro to programming class ten years prior, and didn’t know what to expect. It’s been challenging and frustrating and there were times when I didn’t know if I would even finish, but more than anything else, it’s been a rewarding journey. The capstone course has been a microcosm of the entire program. Starting off our project 8 weeks ago, I knew very little about technical trading and even less about machine learning.
The project started off frustrating, I banged my head against research papers and articles and all sort of different materials I used to try to get up to speed. In week 3 of the term, it finally began to come together when we got our first ML model training and making trades. The model was no good and wasn’t profitable, but it was finally doing something. This was a turning point in the term, with the ML model setup we could start making tweaks to try and make our bot more profitable. Having a functional model opened up so many opportunities to learn and go deeper into the details of what makes the machine learning agent work too. We began to dive deeper into modifying the learning environment, we were able to build custom reward models and we even got our model loaded into a module with a brokerage API that allows the bot to make trades in real time. All of this hinged on getting that first model training.
Besides the technical knowledge I’ve gained from this project, I was reminded that I can learn new and difficult things, that taking a hard problem bit by bit can make the whole thing seem more manageable. This has been a recurring theme throughout my time at the Oregon State University, learning new things is hard, but with perseverance, eventually the new difficult thing becomes manageable. I’m excited to take the energy into my post grad life, there is still so much to learn and I’ve only been able to scratch the surface in the program so far. I’m already looking forward to jumping into my next project I have planned after the quarter wraps up!
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