Is 20 plus years long term? Auto trading is a dream that billions of dollars have been made from by the same people for decades. Renaissance Technologies does nothing but auto trade their systems. The founder is worth over 14 billion. The firm has made over 60 billion and been around for over 20 year and their last losing quarter was over 20 years ago. Their are a number of automated firms in similar boats.
Dead?, absolutely not but it has gotten more difficult in recent years. This would be a tough environment for a newbie.
manual day trading is alive and well but the hype about it is dead, .... the morons who believed in fairy tales lost all the money and gone from the scene... and the next generation of morons (the so called millennials, generation x, y, z ... whatever) they do not have money yet (and may be never will) ... hence the props and others who used to live off the moron's money - out of busisness
I have never put on a "manual" trade. Yes, I press the transmit button often but there is no discretionary bias, I never skip anything. Will give discretionary trading a try in the future with a small account, just to see how I do.
It does the entry but I usually prefer sending the order myself. I'm not good enough of a programmer to ensure there won't be any errors. Full auto-traders who don't even monitor are brave, I can't do it - there's just too much that can go wrong. For all practical purposes I'm an auto-trader though. IB also charges more for API orders and I'm a cheap bastard.