I read like 5 or so books about trading, mostly the classic ones, and tried to toy around with backtracking some self-made strategies using MetaTrader: https://www.metatrader4.com/en/trading-platform
First week was funny. I kept thinking I found goldmines with fine-tunned stochastic lagging indicators, only to realize that I overfitted and an algo that made me rich when tested against a certain period of time would make me go broke when applied to another period.
I tried applying some defense against local maximum, but to no avail.
Best I could do is tie after paying exchange fees. And that took me endless weekends toying around with code, reading books and articles.
My hunch is that algos that don't rely on external signals (i.e. news) need extreme technical edge like High Frequency Trading have with their ultra low latency and premium exchange data feeds.
And I wasn't ready to dive into news sentiment analysis and other external indicators.
