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These are some great comments on managing risks with an auto trader. I think like designing a plane you have to take a hard look at what can go wrong and design for worst case. I have extensively looked at this on my system and can't say it is fail safe but have things in place that give me a good amount of confidence. Even so if I go leave my system unattended I keep laptop with me at all times so can access my server. Autopilot works great but still want a pilot close by just in case.
A few things I do to protect my system.
I recently went to a dedicated server close to the exchanges. This gives me speed but also gives me redundant internet connections power backup etc.. My provider guarantees 100% uptime but even so I still believe there is always risk of going down. Not only can internet connections be lost but no way to mitigate risk of hardware failure. I feel like dedicated server in a data center minimizes risk in this area but does not negate it completely.
As it has been discussed here with most brokers Ninjatrader places stops at the exchange but any OCO orders are managed on your local machine. Meaning any targets, break even moves, trailing stops etc sit on your machine. If your machine goes down these things will not be managed while down. But you will still have a stop at the exchange that protects you.
One of my worst fears because of OCO targets being on local machine has always been what happens if in a trade I lose internet connection the stop gets filled while connection is down. Connection then comes back up and NT does not realize stop has been filled so it keeps managing targets. Target gets filled and is now a rogue trade with no stop because stop at exchange was filled. In essence the trade was over with stop being filled so target getting filled would not end trade but just leave a floater on the market with no protection.
Under this scenario would be better if connection never came back up and stop filled ending the trade. What I do to protect my system in this scenario is when the connection comes back up I have auto trade strategy immediately close any open orders if stop was not filled and close all pendings like targets etc. I also have it stop taking any new trades and notify me that connection was lost but came back up. I essentially have it reset itself and do nothing until I can take a look at it see what went wrong.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
There have been a few threads with much discussion of automated trading, and there is some support for a separate forum. So, I would like to propose a forum called
Automated Trading and Testing
for discussion of not only automated trading, but automated …
Don't mind at all. I am using steadfast networks. So far they have been good and I am getting less than 1ms latency to the rithmic servers. I wrote a up a post about my experience so far here
After much deliberation I just set up a dedicated server for my auto trading strategy via Ninjatrader. I am writing this post to provide information to others who might be considering the same path. I debated doing this for the last year.
I would …
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
NT 6.5 had some problems but I find NT7 works quite well. Couple it with a zenfire or rithmic feed and it is very fast and quite stable. I think it depends what you are doing. I don't know if I would use it for a scalp type strategy where trades were going off every few seconds or minutes. It might work fine for that I have never tried but it might tax it. I think every platform has it's advantages and disadvantages. Just have to make sure the strategy being used works well within the limitations of the platform.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
I would suggest anyone who is an autotrader or interested go to thread Xeno posted above and put up a post saying you would support a forum for autotrading. There are so many topics to discuss around autotrading that have a dedicated forum where multiple threads can run on the subject in one place would be beneficial. His thread is a request for the forum to be created on Big Mikes.
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
After much deliberation I just set up a dedicated server for my auto trading strategy via Ninjatrader. I am writing this post to provide information to others who might be considering the same path. I debated doing this for the last year.
I would …
"The day I became a winning trader was the day it became boring. Daily losses no longer bother me and daily wins no longer excited me. Took years of pain and busting a few accounts before finally got my mind right. I survived the darkness within and now just chillax and let my black box do the work."
I can't think of anything more stressful than reacting to signals manually. The power of discretionary trading lies in placing limit orders in advance...
The whole point is to anticipate likely scenarios and places your orders accordingly...