Unemployed Programmers Turn to Stock Trading

The IT industry is becoming increasingly difficult these days, especially for software companies backed by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and central enterprises, which have reached extremely challenging situations. For example, our company has only paid salaries up to April, meaning we've been working for love for the past six months.

1. Background

The R&D department I manage currently focuses on two main business areas:

1. Application Development and Customer Customization Based on Kingdee Cloud Cangqiong Low-Code Development Platform:

To be honest, developing on a low-code platform does significantly improve both project quality and efficiency compared to regular SpringBoot project development. Developers only need to focus on core business logic, while platform-level basic functions are configured. The Kingdee Cloud Cangqiong low-code platform includes Xinghan, Xingkong, Xingchen, and OEM. Currently, we mainly focus on business expansion around Xinghan, Xingchen, and OEM.

In short, the platform is very powerful, but unfortunately, our company's business expansion capability is poor. Combined with insufficient product awareness, whenever there's a project, product R&D gets sidelined. But now even central and state-owned enterprises are tightening their belts - the landlords have no surplus grain.

2. B2B Projects

Our tech stack is SpringBoot + Vue/React + Enterprise WeChat, roughly this combination. Projects developed based on this model are full of bugs that are impossible to fix completely. This also determines that such projects won't be very large in scale. Among these are also central and state-owned enterprise clients, mainly featuring "programming for leadership," which is where many incredible requirements come from.

3. C2C Projects

C2C projects mainly include mini-programs, Android applications, etc. There are many development tools for mini-programs like UniApp, Taro, etc. Android development tools include native Java, Flutter, UniApp. Currently, I mainly promote Flutter - except for Dart's callback hell being a drawback, everything else is great.

2. Current Situation

Currently, speaking for myself, my skill stack is quite diverse - I should be considered what's called a "full-stack engineer." Handling a complete project from frontend to backend to mobile development by myself is not a big problem. However, no matter how good your technical skills are, they can't overcome the 35-year-old barrier.

I believe: Project delivery is the prerequisite. Some technologies just need to be usable - when you need to master them deeply, check the source code; when you don't need mastery, just use them lightly.

Over 10 years of development experience (some sensitive company projects won't be listed):

• Used Taro for mini-program development.

• Used WordPress to develop websites, earning 2000 yuan from freelance work.

• Used Flutter to develop an Android screen casting application, used Electron to develop the PC client. The PC interface was developed using React.

• Used Python's Selenium framework to crawl bidding website data for banks.

• Used Laravel to develop a movie information website.

• Used Next.js to develop my own official website: https://lafucode.com

• Used Java to develop a medical waste scanning PDA

• Used Python to develop a stock analysis system (in progress...)

From the above, you can see that I rarely take on freelance work. I previously took on a secondary development project for a NiuShop mall based on ThinkPHP, earning a total of 4000 yuan. The experience was truly indescribable - communicating with people is an art.

Actually, most programmers are similar in nature to construction workers, just with different work locations. So what's the possibility of programmers starting their own businesses? It can be very high or very low - it depends on the individual.

In the current situation where company business is sluggish and I don't really want to take on freelance work, what did I choose? - Stock trading.

Why think this way? I believe money goes where money is.

3. Stock Trading

I entered the stock market after October 2024. Actually, I had always wanted to try it before, but due to various reasons and some people's failed stock trading cases, this idea was shelved. It wasn't until last October that I finally made up my mind to try. Who knew that I got trapped right after entering on October 8, 2024 - truly "investment has risks, enter the market with caution!"

Initially, I played with ETFs, but always felt something was missing. So I chose two stocks, and by November 2024, I had already earned about 2000 yuan. At that time, I felt like the sky cleared up, the rain stopped, and I felt capable again.

Until December 2024, I passed the novice protection period and started paying tuition fees. After being deeply trapped, I cut losses and left. When you start trading, greed and fear begin to dominate your operations.

Until March 2025, I remained in a cash position throughout this period, but my trading heart never died. During this time, I read many books and learned how many successful traders operate. I gradually regained confidence, started small-scale trading, and began to profit.

So the question arises: How exactly do you choose stocks? How do you judge what position a stock is currently in? How do you configure positions? How do you set stop-loss levels?

Sometimes even if you're a blind cat catching a dead mouse and choose the right stock, you still can't hold onto it. For example:

Sometimes when the trend is already declining, you should stop loss and exit in time, but you always think it will rise back eventually. However, you eventually lose patience, cut losses and exit, increasing losses. As shown:

Some are even more impatient. If the timing is wrong for short-term trading, you might fall just before dawn, for example:

Based on the above experiences, can we use some indicators to analyze stock lifecycle health? The answer is definitely yes - otherwise, how would so many quantitative trading software in the market survive?

I always believe that quantitative trading is suitable for major players or hot money. They have large amounts of capital to guide or dominate trading trend directions through quantitative trading, while small retail investors can only follow the trend. Our small amounts of money can't have much impact.

Based on the above, I developed a system myself. This system is mainly used for stock lifecycle monitoring and trend analysis, reasonably calculating positions and stop-loss points based on our buy and sell points.

Currently supported functions include: Relative Strength Analysis, ATR Volatility Analysis, Deviation Rate Analysis, Turtle Trading Rules (in development)

1. Relative Strength Analysis is mainly used to analyze the relative relationship between the current stock and market index, combined with the 30-week moving average position to determine whether to enter the market.

2. ATR Volatility Analysis is mainly used to analyze the Average True Range (ATR) of stocks, assess price volatility, and develop risk management strategies.

By inputting entry price, account funds, risk ratio, etc., develop appropriate risk management

3. Deviation Rate Analysis mainly analyzes the degree of deviation of stock prices relative to moving averages, identifying overbought and oversold signals

Based on the above strategies, ordinary people can also understand the current lifecycle of stocks, providing some basis for their further trading.

Here's a chart of current returns:

Overall, having these indicators makes me more confident when trading. Although there are still failed trades, by strictly controlling positions and exiting when support is broken, long-term profitability is quite obvious - at least more than writing a WeChat public account article.

The entire system is still in the testing phase. More indicators will be added later to assist my trading. If the system is stable enough, some commonly used indicators can be released for everyone to use for free.

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