Research has found that active retail traders underperform passive investors, so think about why you should be the exception. That said, if you are going to day

Research has found that active retail traders underperform passive investors, so think about why you should be the exception. That said, if you are going to day trade, knowing how to program should help you in analyzing your performance. Trading strategies can be automated through APIs offered by Interactive Brokers and some other firms. Yves Hilpisch has written some O'Reilly books about algo trading using Python.