089 – Automated trading – ‘Set and forget’ or ‘Forget and regret’?

One of the appeals of automated trading is… well… the automation (derr).

You can ‘set it and forget it’ if you want.

However there are some dangers with doing so.

About a year and a half ago I went through a period of being a little bit slack with monitoring my strategies and there was one occasion where my ‘set and forget’ approach turned into a case of ‘forget and regret’…

… A stop loss order for one of my strategies had been rejected

… I failed to check my trading platform for a few days because I was travelling and tired

… That particular lesson cost me 2-3 times the original stop loss size.

So that was a stoopid thing to do!

But I learnt my lesson and now I check my trading platform much more.

A regular checkup to make sure everything is running smoothly is incredibly important.

Technology issues can (and will) happen at any time.

But there’s another process I’ve implemented each month which has helped me to identify issues that could have gone on for a lot longer if I’d left them unchecked.

I got this process from Kevin Davey, so I’ve asked Kevin to join us for a quick chat to explain his own monitoring process, including some examples of the things he’s found by following this process.

So lets head over to my chat with Kevin Davey to hear more.