The educational value far outweighs the price of admission. It's responsible for my trading success. It really was a life changing decision. Without SO, I would never have learned what I've learned. His successful trading becomes your successful trading - no reason you can't succeed. Kim is very knowledgeable about different options trading strategies. Upcoming trades are discussed and dissected, optimal entries and exits are determined.
Over the long-term small cap value stocks have outperformed large cap growth stocks, although not over more recent history. By Jesse, March However, cash savings are not your only option if you have money left over at the end of the month, and there are a lot of other options that could bring greater returns. By Kim, March The jade lizard is one of those bullish spreads with limited maximum profit, and no risk on the upside. It is a combination of a short put with a short call spread. The credit this creates is higher than the span of the spread.
To set this up, two actions are required:. By Michael C. Thomsett, March As a trader, you may find yourself frequently trying to ignore or rationalize emotions. You exit early to lock up profit and avoid a potential blow-up if the trade turns against you. Slight changes to when the program is run can change results dramatically. Unless the creator of the program is coaching you on how to do this or providing long-term updates and monitoring as market conditions change, it's best to avoid getting sucked into the sales pitch.
As alluded to above, successful robotic traders put in a lot of work to creating and maintaining their programs. The real work is maintaining the program. Someone can not simply flick a switch and watch the money roll in while doing nothing. If a person buys an EA, it is unlikely they will have the expertise to know when to intervene and when not to.
Intervening, when not required, could turn a winning strategy into a losing one, just as not intervening when required could drain the trading account in a hurry. In the Market Wizards book series by Jack Schwager , several successful automated traders are interviewed. All these traders were highly engaged with their strategies, and not just sitting back doing nothing.
It is highly unlikely that a person can buy an EA and just leave it running while they sleep and work at another job. This approach may work, but only if they stay on top of the EAs performance, have the know-how to alter the program if market conditions change and know how and when to manually intervene when required. Some people think that robotic trading takes the emotion out of trading.
Unfortunately, this is not true. While the program doesn't feel emotion, the person running the program does. People may feel tempted to intervene when they see the program losing money, but the program may still be functioning well losing trades happen. Or they may intervene to take profits prematurely, manually overriding a trade when the person sees a profit they like.
All these emotionally-driven actions could destroy an EAs profitable edge in the market. Automated traded is rarely auto-pilot trading. Some of the pros of automated trading have already been discussed but let's go through more, in bullet form. Some of the drawbacks of automated trading have already been discussed but let's go through some more, in bullet form. Automated trading can be a beneficial and profitable skill to have, but typically this skill can't be purchased for a few dollars on the internet.
Automated trading takes a lot of work and skill.
To effectively create and maintain an EA, a trader needs both trading and programming knowledge. Robotic trading also requires time. It is not something to set and forget. It needs to be routinely checked and manual intervention may be required when random events occur or market conditions change. Learning to automate strategies is a worthwhile endeavor though. Automating a strategy requires in-depth knowledge of the strategy, and makes testing the strategy very easy.
If a simple strategy can be programmed, seeing how that program performed recently may provide insights into how it will perform in the future.
EAs can monitor more markets for trading opportunities than humans can, and can react quicker when trade signals occur. Don't get lured into sales pitches that promise easy money if you buy an EA. Trade High Volumes: Automated software such as Expert Advisors can perform thousands of trades at one time. Analytic functions with interactive and customisable charts, nine timeframes, and 30 technical indicators.
Mobile trading apps for both iOS and Android devices. Alerts and financial news to alert traders of targeted events that impact financial markets while establishing potential trading opportunities. MT4 Marketplace Due to the popularity and long shelf life of the MT4 platform, MT4 has one of the largest trading platform marketplaces. Backtesting Expert Advisors Backtesting involves running your trading strategies against real historical data to help you develop optimised EAs. The product is an excellent tool for backtesting, however, for comparison, there may be the following potential issues: bit memory: MT4 uses bit memory, meaning it will only be able to handle automated trading software designed for bit memory.
Memory intensive programs may affect backtesting performance. MT4 Strategy Tester can only test with one trading instrument one currency pair in forex markets at a time. MT4 can only communicate with one server at a time. Support MetaTrader 4 MT4 does not offer customer support. Contracts For Difference Trading CFDs MT4 is one of the best forex and CFD trading platforms with access to different markets like hard and soft commodities, cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and altcoins and indices as these instruments trade through decentralised exchanges.
The MetaTrader 5 platform offers the following features: Four execution modes and six pending order types. Full or partial order fills.
An integrated economic calendar, market news regarding economic events and social indicators. Depth of market. Access to Marketplace MT5 has an inbuilt Marketplace tab on the platform. Contracts for Difference Trading CFD With MetaTrader 5 you can trade centrally exchange-traded assets, making market access much better on the newer platform.
If you write quality EAs that take advantage of this memory, then you can improve overall platform performance, resulting in faster-automated trading. Multi-Threaded Backtesting MT5 can test multiple financial instruments at one time. This may be important if you have Expert Advisors performing many trades and simultaneously analysing high volumes of data. Or, if you want to backtest a strategy against multiple currency pairs. Unlike MT4, MT5 can communicate with four servers at one time — a trading server, access server, history server and backup server, resulting in increased backtesting capabilities.
Trading Speed MT5 uses bit memory and 4 servers trading, access, backup and history servers allowing for faster trading capabilities than MT4. If using EAs, it allows traders to avoid potential slippage due to a high workload.
As a result, the growth of the MT5 marketplace is increasing. Pepperstone is our recommended MT5 Broker for Trading Automation The combination of MT5 and Pepperstone is popular due to its access to different markets and asset classes, automated trading systems, and technical analysis tools. Features of cTrader include: 70 pre-installed indicators and 28 timeframes. Level II market depth quotes, suitable for day trading. Server trailing stops. Ability to export and download charts from the trading platform. Trading accounts and templates secured in the cloud. Automate API cTrader Automate API gives you access to all the data you will need to develop a robot or indicator, including market data and trading functions.
Backtesting Visual Testing: To test how a cBot performs against historical ticks or data for a specified period, cTrader provides visual backtesting features. Optimisation: Optimisation tools allow you to find the best parameters for backtesting your cBots. With these features, you can perform and compare multiple backtests. Historical Data: cTrader allows you to backtest against historical data for a wide range of symbols. Statistics: You can review trade statistics such as winning trades, moving averages, net profits and equity drawdowns, which you can match to the profit targets of your backtests.
Backtest History: cTrader will store all your backtesting data so you can review it in the future. Eight types of orders — market, limit, stop, trailing stop, one cancels the other, one triggers the other, triple orders and oblique orders. Unlimited timeframe selection. State-of-the-art market scanning tools to identify securities that match your investment criteria. Automation by Programming You can write your own automation using the ProBuilder language. Historic and Real-Time BackTesting You can backtest against historical data going back several years for many time frames.
Offline Trading Unlike Expert Advisors and cTrader that require you to either have your computer running or to use a virtual private server VPS for your automation tools to run, ProOrder operates via its own server. Social-Copy Trading: when you copy the style of other traders as well as engage and learn from them. In this sense, trading is more communal as you are communicating with other traders via social trading tools.