Ouch. Today sucked. I even sent an instant message to my friend this morning, warning him that I thought there was a chance we would get chopped up today. We did.
The ATS made four trades and was stopped out of all of them. I watched the trades go through and none of them went our way for even a minute. We were always in the hole.
Today also sucked because some of the things we thought we had fixed came back - like orders for the wrong number of shares. And the damn computer that the damn thing is on is now acting unstable. Damn it.
The real problem is not losing today. Honestly I expect days like this. The real problem is not profiting like we should have yesterday. In order for this system to work, it needs to work - it can’t reject orders and it can’t crash.
One thing that is great about an ATS, though, is that your ego is not nearly as involved as with trading on your own. At least for me. The ATS lost money today, but whatever - I didn’t lose money. The computer did. Now if I had traded as poorly as the ATS today, it would have hurt a lot more. I guess I would feel more responsible or something.
Sure, there are a lot of subtle advantages a human trader has over a computer today. But I see a lot of potential with using a program to trade. It more clearly separates the ego from one day’s results. It also is consistent - and this gives you a much more clear understanding of how the system works and how well it performs. And what to tweak.
I’ll post February results for the ATS later tonight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under ATS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.