I was reading an interview with one of guys who's doing very well in automated trading championship, and he's said that he doesn't do automated trading with real money because its too hard to make money with all the slippage. Is this true? Because I've been working on making an EA for a while and the backtests seem good, but... Is it really possible to make money with EAs? Thanks
For a first timer, to set up to trade discretionally this may take you a few hours to set up your broker account and then 5 minutes to work out to place your trades. For a first timer, to set up to trade automatically you'll be lucky to set up under 12 months. I did but then again I'm a hermit and shut off 95% of any social life - I was working a 40 hour job as well as about 50 hours per week coding. This is how bad it was, I was living at the time close to the Great barrier reef in QLD for 9 months, I love snorkeling and never once got to see the sights.
Most likely you won't get rich. However, it is possible to set up an automatic system yielding acceptable results in a retail setting ...
Well that's the thing about most quant strategies right? The strategies themselves are typically "dumb". Where the difficult part comes in is how to actually execute these orders and so on. Like they say, the devil is in the details.
Probably (well, most likely not impossible), but if you look at the Automated Trading Championships' results and you want to pick a group of systems to diversify, it is almost impossible to find a consistent AND profitable system, let alone 4-5. Had you picked the top 10 systems after 2 weeks and invested even money with them, you would be down now, 2 months later. And we didn't even add the slippage issue. So what does that tell you?
It's a poor sample of set of people to choose from, people who actually know what they're doing have absolutely no incentive nor time to join such a competition.