I turn off my demo systems from time to time, or I cut the internet connection just to see what happens. If you know what a chart, a bid, or an ask price is, then you should probably start to learn the basics about automated trading. Most people think something like it worked yesterday, it worked last week, so why shouldn’t it work forever? Look at your past results and count how many losses you have caused yourself with your own stop loss. What is not probable might hurt you when it occurs and might have bad consequences.

A fair amount of data is what we need to calculate probabilities and make good decisions to improve our trading results. Just start to build and improve an automated trading system that fits your needs. Invest some time and find out how to get rid of the disadvantages of being a hope trader. In real trading, you need to adjust your risk in a way that will save you and your account even in an unpredicted crisis. How do you know which stop loss is the best solution?

Well, you can measure it and compare it with other stops. Basically, every stop loss comes with a cost, and the lower the cost, the better it is. With a high risk setting, you will see a lot of positions that are traded at the same time. Any drawdown for your own real account can cost you sleep. There is a quote that life is what is happening while you are making other plans.

This is so true. Most traders start to trade because they want the money which they believe will make them feel good, right? A strategy test will run for a minute or so, and afterwards I have a result. Easy to do, easy not to do. If you think it is a good idea to adjust your car speed to the traffic on the road, you might find out that it is also a good idea to do that in trading.

If you are good in sports, you probably have spent a few hundred hours training how to become better. I have tried manual trading when I started out and I had really bad results. A few trades were profitable, a lot of other trades were losses. What will your trading system do when there is a power outage? I collected a lot of source code modules and examples in my library so I could use them over and over again.

Calculators and chess computers are specialized to do just one thing. They process a defined set of rules and they can do it faster and better than you and me because it is the only thing that they do. They are trained to do just this one thing exceptionally good, and they do nothing else. Actually, it is not so hard to find the right answers to all the questions, but it depends on you and your will to put in the time, money and effort it takes to become a successful trader. Some people try to find stocks that promise an above average performance and investment magazines introduce management insights for promising companies.

Most of the time, bad problems occur at the very worst time and several unexpected things come together.