Question on usability of autotrading program

[El Trado]

Right, that was my understanding of OP’s point. You can fully automate, but you may not leave it unattended. All your risk controls are useless if you cannot get market data or send/cancel orders. So my solution to this is to trade smaller size so that no matter what happens, I should be able to hold positions until I get back.

Again, do not agree. No problem to leave the system unattended for weeks at a time.

I have the system add take profit and stop loss to all orders as they are entered. These boundaries are normally changed many times during the lifespan of a trade. However, if the system should crash while I am on vacation, the broker will honor the take profits and stop losses, and no harm is done.

Have paid for many vacations by just letting the system run while I am gone. No issues so far, and can't see that it would ever be any issues either....

If you have to constantly monitor it, it is probably not very good to start with.

 

[qlai]

However, if the system should crash while I am on vacation, the broker will honor the take profits and stop losses, and no harm is done.

Right, because the brokers always have their sh*t under control.
Again, I am not arguing against any individual and their practices. The best automated traders that I have come across do not have their systems run without constant monitoring.
That being said, I am on vacation, laying on the beach while my system trades with reduced size and on sub-account with small BP allocation. That’s awesome! Definitely worth the effort for the inspiring auto trader.

 

[El Trado]

Right, because the brokers always have their sh*t under control.

Well. At least my experience have been that the stop losses and take profit works.

However, my strategy include a very high number of trades, so if the system would slip once in a while, I would most likely not have noticed. I give you that....

 

[ValeryN]

... Otherwise seems to me it's quite tricky to build an engine that can be trusted to completely automate the execution of several high volume trades. So much shit can go wrong: market moves away and you only get partial executions, connection gets lost, application crashes just at the sensible moment etc.

I've done it as well as few other people here, some already posted in this thread.
My journal - Fully Automated Stocks Trading.

I developed software myself and trust it enough to have it manage several hundred thousands $ USD.

It does take time to build up confidence and work thru edge case scenarios. In general - when running something unattended it is a good idea to have 1+ of everything. Also, resiliency and predictability considerations will impact how you design your trading systems. That's part of getting things ready for full automation and minimizing costs of possible mistakes / unknown unknowns.

Val