Hello,

I've been trading a strategy successfully in TradeStation. I am going to start upping the notional value (total dollar amount on the trade) of the trades. Does tradestation ever mess things up? I.e. not exit when it's supposed to?

Wondering if anyone has any experience with this. I may use some leverage on my strategy but don't want to get blown up if TradeStation messes up. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Ryan

Hello,

I've been trading a strategy successfully in TradeStation. I am going to start upping the notional value (total dollar amount on the trade) of the trades. Does tradestation ever mess things up? I.e. not exit when it's supposed to?

Wondering if anyone has any experience with this. I may use some leverage on my strategy but don't want to get blown up if TradeStation messes up. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Ryan

I am pretty sure every platform messes up. We use TradeStation and MultiCharts for trading, all automated. It does have an occasional error. I am not sure where you are in your journey with trading strategies (and I assume automated), so excuse me if I am hitting some very basic points. You have to look at all points of failure for your system:

• Internet connectivity
• Hardware
• Software

We mitigate all of these by having a dedicated virtual machine which only runs our strategies. We do not develop or test on this machine, as TS is notorious for failing, in our experience, when you are live trading and developing on the same PC/machine. You will save yourself a ton of money just by using a machine just for trading. And your trading machine does not have to be a beast of a machine to run your strategies.

Then there are the trades themselves:

• Does your system execute well in simulation? This is a good test, as orders are sent to their servers, but just executed against your sim account. It is also a good test of your hardware.
• Have you had missed trades at your current level of live trading?
• Are you monitoring your system? As they tell us, 'automated trading is not unattended trading'.
• Do you understand how orders are managed by the trade servers? The Trade Manager provides you with a lot of good information. The TradeStation community forums has details on how orders are sent, received, and filled/cancelled/rejected, etc.
• Are they sitting on your machine or are they on the trade server? Market, limit, stop limit, and the such have different attributes and should be well understood.
• Are you using the simple buy, sellshort, sell, buytocover functions, or the more advanced OrderTicket feature?
• How many trades are you executing per day? The more trades, the greater chance of having one of them failing.

Kevin Davey ( @kevinkdog ) has written a best practices guide, but I think it is only available to students of his Strategy Factory course (I am an alumni of the course). In any case, here is a link to his free stuff, which is invaluable to a beginning algo trader: https://kjtradingsystems.com/free.html. He is a guy who has been there and done that.

Let me know if this helps or have other questions.

@vmodus gives excellent advice above.

I can tell you that EVERY platform I have ever worked with has at times messed up. Many times, the screw up can be traced back to me (like the time I send 300? orders in 1 minute - I did a YT video on that debacle), but sometimes the software itself screws up.

The key is not to eliminate problems - that will never happen - but make sure you monitor what is going on. As they say "automated trading does not mean unattended trading."

I may use some leverage on my strategy