I handled this issue by switching my strategies to Visual Basic. There are a lot of advantages that I have found so far. Almost eliminating erroneous trades is probably the biggest.
maxpi (or anyone) what type of watchdog software would you recommend using? I too would prefer to have a built in safeguard limiting the number of trades made in a day. Thanks. lassiter
Are you using Trade Station? That can easily be done by using the following if tradestoday(date) < N then ... end;
As long as your trading is not hyperactive (like avg trade duration = approx 3 seconds or whatever) and you take into account what others have said here, #1 is OK. i.e. you baby sit TS whilst it is auto-trading for you, and you handle exceptions. With regards to #2, forget it, and I mean it when I said it is not a TS issue. It has nothing to do with TS. Would you trust any unsupervised autonomous man-made entity trading on your behalf? I must emphasize that word - unsupervised. Do you have a fault tolerant cluster? Do you have fault tolerant internet connectivity / auto broker switching? WTF do you do when ES Globex goes down (if you were trading that animal)? Does you strategy offset your risk by taking the other side in SP (pit) or YM (CBOT)/SPY (AMEX) (or whatever) if CME is not accessible? Something to think about... You'll be OK, just don't think you can party like there's no tomorrow totally grooving out on some deephouse, with your PC trading for you. Regs, EQ.
Use a global variable in all your strategies that gets incremented with every trade. Have the strategies check it before placing a trade, if the number is too high it's a no-go.
Thanks for the perspectives How does one ensure that only the current bar is used to generate trades in TS?
Tradestation only places actual live orders if they are generated by the last bar on chart (and of course the strategy is enabled to generate real orders). There is no need to check for that, it is done automatically for you, and the reason is that if you load a strategy for a data stream, or a refresh of the data stream is done, old orders will not be placed again as live orders. So, let's say it is now 12:00 PM, and you start Tradestation and load a strategy for a 5min data stream, and let's say that at 10:00 AM a buy order is generated by the strategy. Tradestation will not place that order live, since it was generated by a bar that is not the last bar on chart. If, on the other hand you started Tradestation at 9:30 AM and loaded the strategy, at 10:00 AM, when that bar was the last bar on chart, the order will be placed as a live one. In both insctances the strategy order will be generated, but only in the second case as a live order too.