A Side Hustle you can start as a Forex Trader

Howdy howdy Trader!

If you have been in the trading space for a while you have probably come across countless people selling trading bots.

And not just that, they make sure to lock the bots to a specific account. This ensures you won’t resell the bot.

As you can imagine, this makes the business not all that passive for them.

They have to attend to the clients and compile the bots every time someone makes a purchase.

What if there was a way to make it all passive.

And by passive I mean, you won’t have to interact with the customer at all.

They come to your landing page, make the purchase, and automatically get sent the bot. All that for as low as $16 per month.

I have decided to attempt this kind of passive income so here is my plan:

1. Someone makes a purchase and gives their account information during purchase.

2. In the background, once the purchase is confirmed, have a system that auto compiles the bot and sends it to the users email.

This of course requires a trading bot to start with.

The Product

While I do not have a trading strategy to sell, I have decided to make a bot that covers all candlestick patterns.

The single, double and triple candlestick patterns. For example, when the doji happens or the three white soldiers occur, a notification and alert will be sent out to the user. Technically this is not a trading bot as it doesn’t do any trading but imagine swapping this for a working strategy.

Automation

The purchases will all be made on Stripe. Why Stripe? It’s easy to setup , has multiple payment options(even paypal) and has good developer support. If we ran into a technical problem we have access to great support from Stripe and other developers in the ecosystem.

On the checkout page, we ask the user for their email and three account numbers. This gives the user an option to add either demo or live accounts as they see fit.

Why three accounts you ask?

If I am being honest, it’s for selfish reasons.

I want to reduce as much customer support as possible. I can envision getting support requests like ‘I mistyped my account’ or ‘that account was closed’.

The user gets three shots to think long and hard about which accounts to use.

Once the payment has succeeded, Stripe notifies our backend of the payment and passes along the account numbers. Here is an example of what Stripe sends to our backend

{
  "object": {
    ...
    "custom_fields": [
      {
        "key": "accountnumberone",
        "label": {
          "custom": "Account Number One",
          "type": "custom"
        },
        "optional": false,
        "text": {
          "maximum_length": null,
          "minimum_length": null,
          "value": "963852741"
        },
        "type": "text"
      },
      {
        "key": "accountnumbertwo",
        "label": {
          "custom": "Account Number Two",
          "type": "custom"
        },
        "optional": false,
        "text": {
          "maximum_length": null,
          "minimum_length": null,
          "value": "4585417452"
        },
        "type": "text"
      },
      {
        "key": "accountnumberthree",
        "label": {
          "custom": "Account Number Three",
          "type": "custom"
        },
        "optional": false,
        "text": {
          "maximum_length": null,
          "minimum_length": null,
          "value": "6258784516"
        },
        "type": "text"
      }
    ],
   ...
    "customer_details": {
     ...
      "email": "[email protected]",
      "name": "Wamaitha from YouTube",
      "phone": null,
      "tax_exempt": "none",
      "tax_ids": []
    },
    ...
}

The backend will be a Windows VPS. This is because compiling the bot requires a Windows environment.

Within the VPS, I will have three services. The first service waits for the payment event from Stripe. Once it receives the data, it compiles the trading bot and calls upon the second service which sends the email with the compiled bot to the client.

The email service also calls upon the third service that saves the data to a database in case we ever launch a new version of the product we can send the updated version to the clients.

Here is what the current iteration of the email looks like:

There is a programming concept called Idempotency.

This is a characteristic of a system, which guarantees that performing an operation multiple times will yield the same result as if it was executed only once.

Idempotency is the main objective with everything happening in the VPS. Theoretically, if the system is always at optimal performance we can have this setup once. Truly making it passive.

Maintenance costs ($16)

The upside about all this is we can easily run the system with as low as $16 per month. The $16 breaks down as follows:

This would be higher if you hired a customer support assistant. I will handle all the customer support requests myself.

For the $10 VPS, from my load testing, we can process at least 10 orders per second without throttling the VPS.

Unless you’re famous and launch the product to millions of people, this should be enough per month for anyone with a small - medium traffic.

If you get more traffic, you can always scale to a bigger server. You can afford it at that point!

As far as sending emails go, you can actually use some free or cheaper alternatives such as Amazon, Sendgrid or Brevo. My experience with all of them has been demoralising.

Turns out this industry is plagued with so many scammers that anytime you signup to these services and indicate that this is the kind of service you will be offering, the system locks you out. Hence, the use of the google workspace.

Don’t think that this is a ‘safer’ option to scam. Google has very advanced tech to detect scams, so you better make sure the service is legit or you will also loose the workspace subscription.

Technically this can be a $10 side hustle.

Perhaps the best part about this specific hustle is that the definition of a Doji today will still probably be the same 10 years from now. Unless new candlestick patterns are introduced the product remains ever green with no requirement to keep updating the source code.

Which brings us to the setup costs.

Setup Costs

Starting the hustle will probably be the most expensive part. Collecting payments requires a Stripe account.

Setting up the Stripe account requires you to have a verified business. Stripe also works with a select number of countries so if you’re in Africa like me, you will either have to setup a business in a Stripe supported country or use another vendor.

In my case, I setup the business in the UK and it cost around $180. This was enough to cover incorporation and setting up an address in the UK.

In retrospect I should probably have setup the LLC in Dubai or some tax haven. However, this would be relatively more expensive.

This arrangement also complicates taxes to some extent. Pay the UK government the corporate and digital tax and then pay income tax in my country.

The total break down for me was a total investment of $194.

The 1 month development time is because I am working on very many candlesticks. They are 68 in total as of this posts writing! This is like coding 68 different trading bots!

The development and automation costs for me are zero because I can do all the coding myself, however, if you were to hire a dev to do the coding, it could cost anywhere from $0 - infinity depending on how complicated the bot is, if the dev is part of the company etc.

Let’s use my rates as an example.

This would bring the costs on your part to $694.

The development costs will vary depending on the bot complexity and time taken. However, for easy math I have used the $300

If you priced the product at say $80, you would need 9 sales to break even.

Marketing

Setting up the system is actually the easy part. Without traffic its all useless. The adage ‘if you build it they will come’ doesn’t work.

I will cover my marketing plan on the next issue!

Thanks for reading!