It entirely depends on your lifestyle and how you build your system. It is possible to work full-time, but you'll need to find out how this can work out for you. Don't expect stellar results in either working or trading though. If possible, I'd recommend reducing work-time so not too much energy and time is spent there. In the beginning, I tried researching everything under the trading umbrella, mainly signal processing type of stuff. What I can say is that having a full-time job has given me much more focus and makes it easier to prioritize, rather than chasing pink unicorns at every other corner. You need balance and you need other input during the process of finding your trading style. So it'll take it's damn long time.. I believe you'll have a hard time following a live auto trading system during work. Too much can break and you'll need to watch it realtime to really improve it. That's a real conflict of interest that can bring various difficulties. What works for me is trade small and only EOD managing triggers after close. There's much less need to watch live action and the losses don't bother me so much as to disrupt work. It also eliminates need for VPS and to maintain live connectivity, so is low overhead. It may be a false sense of security, but my triggers can last for months without maintenance. It'd be good to have a real trading-idea before you commit too much though. Without a real trading idea, I can say from experience that whatever trading you do, will either be lucky or lossy, even after years of doing this. If your system is "lucky", it'll eventually become a loser, especially if automatic. Automation is really the easy part and something I did almost at the start, but couldn't use it then because I lacked ideas on how to generate signals. Automation isn't really an edge, it's a double-edged sword that is more likely to slice up your account than anything.
I have put together many many option trading systems. At the moment I am trading two totally mechanical systems I developed. Neither system is directional and when you take that out of the mix I found it doesn't take much time (Well not with these systems anyway). One takes 0-5 minutes a day and when I roll out positions every 2 weeks the one day I roll takes 10-45 minutes. My other system is boring (Which I like). I might make an adjustment or take profits once every 3 weeks which takes about 5 minutes.
It is a good question. I spend about 10 minutes a month on updating specific pieces of code so for me a full time job would certainly be possible. I think that for all those in the early development stage it would be hard to both work full time and produce a quality automated trading system. There are so many working parts to put together. Regards
You make assumptions and you do not base your statements on objective data. Go on Striker.com, MyFxBook.com, Barclayhedge.com and you will notice that many commercial and non-commercial algorithms are used to trade live with success. The whole Wall Street is inflated by quant traders that have network engineers that sit to monitor tick by tick software applications in a data center. I targeted my question to professional traders or aspiring traders that use automated strategies. It's already the second time that somebody replies with oranges rather apples.
It's great to hear that you found a good balance between work and investing. As you know, it's very risky to quit your job even if you have a long and positive experience to support that decision. May I ask if you use a VPS and if yes, which company? Kind Regards.
I am planning to start designing trading systems on the daily time frame based on the previous daily close candle. I think that it can help to have more time to follow the trading systems. For monitoring, I wanted to create an alert system that sends me an SMS anytime the system does not receive a tick data for more than a certain amount of minutes.
Sounds like you are looking to pick the right direction of an underlying and profit if it goes your way am I correct?
It depends on how often the system wants to trade. I am trading a system based on closing prices that takes about 5 minutes to run. I believe Interactive Brokers lets you submit trades as CSV files, and when I do this I should be able to reduce trading time to 2 minutes or less. It helps if you can install some software on your office computer or if you can access your own laptop.
I agree. If your system has an ATIT (average time in trade) of a few hours, then maybe it would work-out....but if it's minutes or seconds.....forget it.