The Best Automated Trading Software is not enough

For those who are new in Automated Trading, it is important to know that finding a recurring behaviour in a financial instrument is a really hard and time consuming activity. Automated traders need to combine several hypothesis before finding something interesting to work with. It is really important to have an automated trading software where to put input parameters on and find out some financial valid trading strategies on one or more financial instruments.

Let’s make an example, it is surely easier to understand what I mean. Let’s suppose that you want to find some evidences in the behaviour of Dax Future symbol but you have no idea where to start from. An automated trading software is a good help to find some evidences. We usually work with one we developed together with a business partner, but there are a lot of Automated Trading Softwares around the web.

Algorithmic Trading Softwares usually work as follow:

1. After installation in your computer, they request you to load some high quality historical data inside
2. Pick some indicators you want to test over the financial instrument you have just loaded in the Automated Trading Software
3. Run the Automated Trading Software engine and try all the combinations for the indicators selected previously over the data loaded
4. Save and export some good-looking raw strategies as a result of the optimisation made with the Automated Trading Strategy Software.

Now you have your MT4 Automated Trading Strategy ready to run for optimization. In fact thanks to this kind of Software it is possible to have an idea of a trading strategy over at least thousand of wore strategies discarded, but it is not enough unfortunately. If you want to be profitable, you need to keep working.

Now that the Automated Trading Software has found out a good strategy, it is important to export and load it to your trading platform (we use Metatrader 4, since we think is the best for accessibility and ease of use) and optimise with Stop Loss, Take Profit and other parameters according to your best practice.

So, an Automated Trading Software is necessary to save time finding out some good evidences on the behaviour of a financial symbol, while coding skills are necessary to optimise the first evidence and give the trader fingerprint over the raw strategy.

The practice of using Automated Trading Software and learning how to modify the output code from the Software, is necessary according to us in order to be profitable.

Unfortunately nothing comes for nothing, so easy money is not allowed and even if you have a good automated trading software, you need to learn coding and raise your trading skills to have a chance to be profitable. Of course, the Automated Trading Software is the best help for an AlgoTrader on a time saving point of view.

Conclusions

There is not a magic wand to be profitable, but the knowledge of good practices can help traders earning money from their trading strategies and avoid losing more than they gain. A good approach is algotrading, but working with altos is couplex and a valid way to make it easier to find out some raw strategies is to use an Automated Trading Software to identify them and code some fine tunings on it. Forget those people who say that finding a strategy with these software is enough, but still keep using it, because is the only way to scrape million of combinations and find good evidences in the market to be optimised with coding.