Autotrading

Why automate part or all of your trading?

Answer: To grow past your barriers. Let us start by saying that automation is not a panacea. It can help in many situations, but the best computer made is between your ears.

Problems for manual traders

• For many traders it is tough to continue to grow past a certain level. Most often our capacity for maintaining proper risk reward shrinks when we begin making bigger trades. The potential pain of a sizable loss pushes us more toward a fear/greed emotional reaction rather than a measured logical reaction. It becomes easy to get too contractive or expansive.
• Everything is moving faster. How do you keep up with the bots that are collocated with the markets arbitraging your orders?
• We can only process a certain number of events at a time, so we miss many opportunities. We pass on profitable but inefficient strategies because we make more money elsewhere. When the markets are rocking we can’t get to all the trades that are available.
• Our trading strategies/behavior sometimes changes when we have other distractions in our life; births, deaths, breakups, illness, weddings, etc.

How automating can help you

• Make your trades less emotional. The computer can follow the rules better than you can. Make sure they are sound rules and know when to change them. (Easy to say, hard to do.)
• Execute faster by not reacting through your eyes to your fingers. Move the decisions upstream and collocate your rules/strategies in a data center.
• Allow yourself to focus on interpreting information that computers can’t. If you offload a great deal to a computer, it leaves you with brain cycles to do the big trades. Why not automate a rote strategy or strategies and concentrate on more efficient opportunities. Perhaps you have a good feel for the market and turn up some strategies and turn down others while still looking for big opportunities.
• Capture the entire opportunity wave. Our experience has been that we make 75 percent of our money in 15 percent of the time. When that 15 percent of time comes, usually there are vastly more opportunities than we can process manually. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to handle 10 or 100 or 1000 times the number of trades that you could handle manually during those periods?

How we approach autotrading

Our goal is to empower traders to automate any part or all of their trading from manual to grey to black. We believe it is essential that traders don’t have to wait for the technology team to deliver hard coded software features. The aim for autotrading at Kershner is to allow traders to quickly identify opportunities, grow capital traded and reduce risk.

Autotrading is so important to us that we acquired Insight Trading & Automation (link to Insight Trading subsidiary page), the leading market screening software for active traders. Insight Trading and Gr8trade ® allow our traders to quickly implement thousands of alerts, simulations and automated models. We consider the autotrading ability of Insight/Gr8trade® so valuable that we do not sell it as a product outside KTG.

Autotrading features and benefits we believe important include:

• Build highly specialized, precise strategies
• Able to program and change strategies easily on-the-fly
• Be as aggressive or conservative as desired
• Execute multiple strategies simultaneously
• Keep strategies private and visible to only you
• Adapt quickly to changing markets