Common Pitfalls of AutoTrading
We have identified the following seven common pitfalls that can cause the performance of your real trading account to differ from the hypothetical performance data posted on this Web site. In order to turn on AutoTrading, you will need to acknowledge that you have read and understand this page.
If you are considering becoming an AutoTrading client, you should know about some of the mistakes some clients make:
- Clients select too many systems to trade at once without the required equity to fully participate in the combined portfolio. Some clients may lack sufficient equity to trade even one system.
- Clients decide to scale down or up certain systems. In other words, they may choose to trade only 5% of the system's signals or may choose to trade 500%. Additionally, clients may decide to limit the number of contracts traded or open at any one time for a particular system, which again could have a material effect on performance.
- Clients at times may receive margin calls and therefore must liquidate positions, again because they don't have enough equity to ride out volatility.
- Clients place manual trades totally unrelated to the system or systems they trade.
- Clients customize the systems they decide to follow. For instance, clients may set their own stop losses, manually intervene (close out a winner/loser manually before the system says they should).
- Clients at times subscribe to systems that trade a variety of products, but their brokerage account is only set up to trade one. For example, a system they choose may trade stocks and futures and the client has a futures' only account.
- Commissions and system fees are another reason actual customer performance varies from the hypothetical performance.