Or he is getting paid to generate traffic on ET... Traffic many times is many times related 1on 1 with stupid threads. Are you sure your name is not humpty dumty?
From working with a number of other traders on a widely used platform on auto-trading for many years back in the day, this is what I learned: The only people making $ via auto-trading had a great deal of trading experience and were strong with risk mgmt. Most had some programming experience to begin with. Auto-systems work for the conditions they were built for, they tend to work well only at times, and when they go bad look out below. Those doing well are typically running numerous systems to be able to emulate the adaptability of a good discretionary trader. You will need to have some deep pockets for this and will spend a great deal of time on constant R&D. And don't think you will be on easy street right out of the gate - far from it. You will probably work your tail of day & night for many years just to get your systems running and probably won't blink watching them run live for a long time, you will probably have more trading emotions to deal with than you ever imagined. Maybe inside of a 5-10 years you can get dialed in. No emotions? Dream on! It will become your obsession, it may drive you mad. Maybe try watching the film 'Pi' to get a glimpse into the auto-trading world.
Wrong,not the lenght in time is relevant, the number of generated trades is relevant. Even much less than 5 years can be good enough.
Totally agree as that was my experience. Stress levels shot thru the roof and fell back to earth once I threw in the towel and went back discretionary. But I learnt heaps and helped my discretionary method untold. Hence I trade a systematic discretionary system, that is trade with the belief markets are algo driven, therefore trade with no emotion and trade purely on signals created in my head. Use no indicators, zero, zilch, I dont even turn on my computer most days, maybe 10% of the time, other than that I just observe using a tablet. In the market about 99% of the time with up to 20+ positions at any one time, but multiply that by two. (3 trading account total) Smallest acc. has about 6 positions constantly
Motley Fool use to have a position rectifying systems board. They basically reallocated out of losers into winners at specified intervals. The main thing with this is, a basket of equities, a portion will trend up or down, or consolidate. If most trend either up or down, than the system ends up very profitable. But if the majority enter a consolidative phase, than the interval position rectifying leads to drawdowns.
If that case, I have a system for you. Given the last five years worth of data for SPY, buy on any day that is divisible by 3 (i.e. the 3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th etc.) and sell two days later. I bet that system will make you money and have plenty of trades in the sample.
Top comment. The theory is that you program something, let it run and you go on a holiday. In practice however - you'll encounter latency problems, rare errors that aren't handled properly, problems introduced by updates, possible hardware problems (if not in the cloud) and for years you still can't turn away, feeling the need to watch the code do its thing. And the emotions are very real, like you said, unless one is paper trading. Pi was the movie that got me interested in trading in the first place.
Stop dreaming about auto-trading.It`s not for a bunch of ET lamers(me included).Even if you are able to put 100-200K in.Forget about it.The pair of eyes, what`s between them and your fingers!