One of the things that I do is that I trade at least eight years in a row. And if my risk setting is able to do that and produce a good result, I will use that setting. One of the common ideas is that you maybe want to change the direction of the trading entry after a loss. But why?

Sometimes the market conditions change and whatever might have worked before suddenly is no longer working. Testing two versions for ten years multiplied with ten currency pairs equals 200 back tests, each one for one trading year. Could you do that without automation? Probably not.

I trade to produce good results, improve my systems and get everything as stable as possible. And something that is predictable or stable is not very entertaining.

Each trader has to decide for himself. I put a lot of time and effort into developing an automated system that best meets my needs.

Why would I do automated trading? To see if your system is able to survive under different market conditions. With automated trading, it is possible to do thousands of automated trades on a single rainy Sunday afternoon. I have seen automated systems break down after several thousand trades just because the market conditions changed. For my own trading, the drawdowns for multiplied lot sizes are a little bit too big.

But you will get a good impression of what is possible when you try it on a demo account. Algorithmic trading is about managing things like the current profit, the number of current and allowed positions, and some other settings.

There are people like Ray Dalio who have seen several crisis situations over decades. The good thing is that it is always possible to learn from these situations.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out how all these things influenced your results? Getting something that works is the goal for each trader. So here is how I did that for my automated trading system. One of the biggest advantages for automated trading systems is the fact that the computer can manage several positions at the same time.

I can find out which is the one currency pair that works best for all the systems, or I can find out where I have the highest trading costs.

There is no foolproof entry that would never produce false signals. Nobody can foresee the future.

I learned to use software to do the things that I don’t want to do so I can spend more time with the things I enjoy. Just as with the purchase of a car, the question for each trader is which feature for a trading system is most important to him. Do you check your account conditions carefully? Depending on your broker, you might have very different settings for the required liquidity. Trading success is not so much about the entry signal. More important is what happens afterwards.

My computer needs to be trained once and can do repeatable tasks forever. It doesn’t have good or bad days and works on a consistent basis.

Some people ask me why I don’t do individual programming. The reason is simple: I can’t do everything.

If you want to prove or disprove that something will give you a real market advantage, just do the opposite to prove a disadvantage.

When rookies trade real money, they start to crawl on the plank. Because now it is real money.