I'm a programmer coming up for 40years, messed with some MT4 EA's 10years back, I refuse to waste more time on that as I don't really believe it's possible unless your happy with a very small yearly %, Entries not so hard to code, but at Profit Exits are the real pain to work out logic for, as you don't get to wait for a sign as such to exit. I count on watching the price stall near a point or show strength before I get in, 5seconds live action, you just can't teach a computer to do that. That and I've seen to date exactly ZERO systems which are long term profitable. HFT excluded as there just front running.
I understand your healthy skepticism. Still, unless you believe that 100% of members of this forum fool themselves and each other, strategies that beat S&P500 do exist. Perhaps, a promising approach is to avoid competition and stay in some market niche.
My trading manual.and crazy out performs that massively ( not today barely up ), so yes to can be beaten Does your system generate your exits?.or fixed TP? I don't like fixed TP would solve that side but badly imho.
100% automated. Try to have a %-based stop loss but time-base take-profit, i.e., sell after a given period of time. The latter depends on your strategy, can be minutes or days to hit the point where waiting for the position to grow does not make sense anymore - better to exit it and wait for a new opportunity.
I scalp or close to, no new high in 3mins is 1 of my exits, letting to many stall and reverse on me. Swing?
Hours to days. Sorry, can't be more specific about my work. However, I wish you will automate your approach. It might save you a lot of time.
How does trader automate if they do not use indicators? Only purely price actions and patterns concepts.
Make it formal first, e.g., by following what deaddog suggested. Then, write a program to automate some part of it, then automate everything. Then, backtest it, analyze the results and restart the whole procedure until happy.
Not happening, can't teach a computer to think, few hours per day, much prefer to 8hours at a job, I've got plenty of time although everything else comes before trading. Get a bit more consistent, run the account up to stupid number and retire hopefully to Spain near a nice beach