Working with autotrader

When you trade with an automated trading system, normally you wait for a signal in your e-mail or for an SMS, at that moment you have to run for your PC, or contact your broker to sell or buy whatever your selling or buying. Good chance that the market has already moved against you !

I was running a trade system a couple of years ago. The system was sending me an SMS about twice a week. The system was trading in DAX futures. Although the system was performing well I was loosing money on entry or exit because I had to log in remote after the signal came. Sometimes the market had moved 10 points in my disadvantage. also when you are at work in an meeting trading becomes impossible.

At that point I decided to create the Autotrader. In the beginning it was a quite simple program just listening and scanning a directory for files written by my trading software (Vestics) .

Later I added many options. One of the first options was to receive an SMS when the connection with the broker was interrupted for some reason. When this happens you might lose entry or exit signals. It still happens from time to time, but fortunately not that often.

Sometimes I also manually traded so I had to skip the next automated trade. That is when new options came in. Especially if you do not want to be in overnight this is a useful option.

Now I have everything running on automatic mode. All I need to have is the computer up and running.

All I have done is added one entry to the Windows NT scheduler:

The Autotrader starts, and then fires of TWSstart. TWS start will log me on to TWS and will start my trading software also. This way I am sure things happen in the right order. Do not forget to configure Autotrader in General settings to set up where TWSstart is located.

TWSstart is created by and can be downloaded here: TWSstart