Question about automated trading from a newbie

Quoted from Forex.com.bd-Editorial External answer — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Dave Harris Source score (net votes, not local likes): 2 Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/148162 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. The best answer to this question is to direct you specifically to your broker-dealer to determine exactly how they implement automated trading. However, having been in securities for decades and having been writing software even longer, I would strongly suggest that you not involve yourself with automated trading. It is clear that you lack basic grounding knowledge and this is a very advanced idea. All automated trading does is speed you up. So let me give you the cautionary tale of Knight Capital. At the time of its collapse, it was the largest single trader of U.S. equities. It was a high-speed trading firm. In a matter of just a few hours, it lost $400 million and it knew what it was doing. It made a rookie mistake. If you are curious and have extensive programming skills, the SEC wrote a report on the cause of the technical failure. What was most important was that Knight Capital didn't even know it was happening for quite some time. When it did realize that something was going on, it didn't realize it was the cause. When it did realize it was the cause, they found they had no real way to easily just pull the plug and turn it off. They had placed orders and those orders were live. Turning off the algorithm would just freeze their world in place. They had to do more than just turn it off. They had to undo everything in the unfilled orders. They also had to find the cash to cover the filled orders. If you make a mistake, you may find yourself bankrupt before you even realize you made a mistake. It does not take long for a person like me to empty out the accounts of a rookie using automated trading. It would be faster if you just mailed me all your money so I could take a vacation somewhere that is COVID free like New Zealand. Then, you wouldn't end up in debt and financially insolvent. If you do decide that you want to do automated trading make sure you have a good grounding in calculus, linear algebra, accounting, finance, and economics. Likewise, I suggest being able to code in C, Rust, C++, or C#. C# tends not to be used but is helpful with certain types of devices. You should also be able to code with high proficiency in R and Python. It wouldn't hurt to be able to code in Julia, but that requires a greater amount of mathematical knowledge as it is a functional language. Please do not hand me or someone like me all your money. Go take some away from the big kids. You can if you follow Graham and Dodd methods. Big folk cannot usually allocate large sums into small mistakes and so ignore them. Some of those small mistakes are huge mistakes from the point of view of a small investor. There is a lot of money to be made the old fashioned way.

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