Firstly what do you need to do on a daily basis? I get the impression that you monitor the market during the day, maybe that’s wrong, but if you do why do you find it necessary? I would have thought that once you have your program running, you just walk away and let it work. Given the volumes you do, a lot of trades must be happening so fast that I can’t imagine what you could do anyway.
Secondly you mention doing about 1500 to 2000 trades per day. If its not too nosy a question, how many stocks do you scan to generate that number of trades.
Automation is a powerful thing. While it is possible to leave it unattended, I feel more comfortable to be monitoring it during the day. At times, my systems might run unattended for an hour at a time, but typically, I will at least key an eye on it every 15 minutes or less.
I suspect that 95-99%+ of the days, the automation works flawlessly and absolutely no manual intervention takes place. But, there are always those infrequent times when manual intervention is necessary. For example, what if your brokerage loses all connections to the markets? While this could be handled programmatically, it happens infrequently enough that I prefer to assess and handle the situation manually. There are other such situations that could happen, but each of them are rare. If they were frequent, this the automation would just be modified to deal with it.
The number of markets that I trade varies slightly on a day by day basis. But, currently I trade a list of roughly 700 different stocks and 4 futures contracts. On any given day, I might have one or more trades in ~300+ stocks and 0-4 futures.
Best of luck,
-Eric |
