Why Not Automate Your Trades?
All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Line Your Own Pocket. So this one's gonna be kind of interesting because I actually pinged Dave immediately after being on a Twitter space and said we just had to talk about this. So I was doing this Twitter space with a whole bunch of traders and investors and talking about, you know, what we thought about the markets right now and what we're looking at and all of that. And I just kind of mentioned, you know, how kind of grateful I was to be a quant in this environment where everyone else is kind of freaking out and I just have a robot take a lot of the trades for me, and the amount of resistance I've got from it.
Michael:So, you know, to describe it a little bit to Dave, it was just not so much you're crazy or whatever. It's just like, Oh, I could never let a robot, you know, handle my account or place my trades for it. Like, it wasn't even something that was being considered and interesting. It was just an immediate, oh, wow, I couldn't, I could never do that. So what we're gonna chat about today is we're gonna chat about why people are so adverse to fully systematize their trading.
Michael:And I don't know, some ways that we could potentially get around. So when I'm in these conversations, next time I can be like, yeah, but have you thought about doing this or this might be a good way to get started? Or as someone who has built a whole bunch of trading bots, I'm sure you've got some things to think about with this, Dave.
Dave:Yeah. So the first thing that came to mind as you were talking there was I wanted to ask them, hey. Have you ever used an ATM? Yeah. You don't there was a time there where people wouldn't use an ATM because it wasn't a human.
Dave:And turns out it's actually works pretty well and people prefer it to interacting with a human to get cash now. So that's kind of the first thing that crossed my mind. But yeah. So there's lots of things that that you come across where you're actually that are in this same vein that we do without really thinking about it.
Michael:Alright. So the the counter argument that I'll I'll give right away, I'll play a little devil's advocate on this one as well. So a lot of people are okay with getting in their car and turning on Google Maps. Right? And that's kind of the example I use about a semi systematic trader, Someone who maybe gets alerted for whenever their system tells them to take a trade.
Michael:And they're doing kind of the same thing that the cart, Google Maps is turn right here. And you know, they take a microsecond to think about it, and then they turn right there. I would equate kind of fully auto trading to the self driving car, right? Don't know if you ever been in one of those where you just get in, you say, go here, and it just goes. It almost felt like that level of fear more than anything, not so much, not a trust in the system itself, not a trust in whatever.
Michael:It's just that, yeah, the car might know where to go, but what if it just goes haywire and, you know, slams me into a ditch or something like that. So I think that might be a little bit more where they were thinking and to use that example.
Dave:Yeah. Think that's a good example because think about the big picture of what's possible there. Like, all these accidents that happen because of human error, which is the vast majority I mean, almost all the accident. Yeah. Almost all 98%
Michael:or something. Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. And of all those accidents, almost all of them could be prevented by somebody going a little bit slower, which is kind of crazy to think about. But Yeah. So you have to step back and think about what the goal is. Like, that's and that's a big carrot and that's a long way off, right?
Dave:We can debate about that. But when you step back and think about your own trading, think about what's possible here. Think about taking all the trades that you have now and multiplying it times 10 because you've got an edge and you're exploiting it as well as you can. Like, the thing is automating your trades opens up a whole new set of strategies that you can trade profitably. And I mean, I work with a lot of traders that used to click trade.
Dave:Click trading meaning manually make the trades. If they're trading a system, they're manually pointing and clicking and making trades. And now they're automated. And I can tell you they print money compared to what they used to. I mean, that's just there's just no two ways about it.
Dave:And that's most of them, that is exactly when they earned the corner and became really profitable. So
Michael:I think yeah. And I think that's a a great argument for it. And that's actually how do I say how do I say this though? Sound a little bit douchey. I think that's a more sophisticated argument than than getting the guy who's currently a % discretionary and pulling him into that world.
Michael:But if we're talking to semi systematic traders for me, and and, you know, this is conversations me and Dave are always having offline. That's what got me back into being interested in day trading and and doing more of that is the fact that I'm sitting with unutilized capital, and the the thought of being able to use that in some way in day trading this example, but not taking away from what I'm normally doing because the fact that the system is going to be trading for me, it doesn't add a whole lot of time to what I'm doing. That makes sense, right? So if you are someone now and you have a system and the system's working and it's trading well, the ability to trade more systems for more timeframes, maybe across different markets, maybe you build a system for futures and you don't really need to babysit that because something's happening. I think that makes a whole lot of sense.
Michael:And I think that's good to get the guy who's, you know, maybe 90% of the way there and then pull him into into that. I think the the more interesting kind of argument would to take is the guy who's currently maybe let's take the fully discretionary guy, right? He's got I say fully I don't think there's anyone out there who's fully discretionary. But let's just take the guy. He's got something that he looks for in charts.
Michael:He goes through, you know, 150 charts every night, and he's looking for, you know, breakouts of wedges or something like that. You're William O'Neil type momentum trader dudes. How would you grab someone like that and say, Okay, this would still be a benefit to you in this way? He's not looking to trade more systems. He's not looking to day trade.
Michael:What's your argument to that guy to say, Well, you should solve a robot trade for
Dave:you? Sure. Yeah. So this is exactly the position I was in twenty years ago. And what convinced me was looking at the trades I would miss because I was a little too late with pointing and clicking on the computer to enter the trades.
Dave:Or so that's one thing that's overwhelming. When you look at that and track that closely, you're gonna see some big miss trades. If you if you're trading profitably, you'll see those and they make a big difference. You know, imagine your results if you if you if you're missing, like, one trade a week, one profitable trade a week, go back and look at your results if you weren't to have missed that. That's gonna be a dramatic improvement.
Dave:So that's one thing. The other thing, have you ever made a trading mistake? Have you ever pointed and clicked and did something that you didn't mean to do? Of course. We all have.
Dave:Mhmm. I mean, I've
Michael:added added an extra zero, and then you 10 x the position that you were currently yeah.
Dave:Yep. Totally done that. I've add you know, what's even more frustrating than adding a zero is accidentally putting one too few. That's even worse to me because you're like, ah, I did everything right. I was you know, I I got the trade, But dang, I'm 10 times less than the size that I should be.
Dave:This is this is so frustrating.
Michael:And there is in that situation. Right? There's a 100% chance that that's an amazing trade. If if you 10 x too much, it's it's definitely a loser. And if you only get one tenth of what you wanted, it is definitely a winner, just the way it works.
Dave:Yeah. So, yeah, you know, like we've talked about, I'm sure in some episodes on this podcast, go back and track those results. Track the trades you miss, track those mistakes you know you're making, and add those up and see what that would mean to you. And if and, you know, that's gonna make a dramatic difference, both of those things. But you don't have to go fully automated from that point to start getting the benefits of some automation.
Dave:You don't have to completely hand things over to a robot and let it do everything. There's lots of steps you can do in between here and there to gain confidence and get some of the benefits that we're talking about without fully fully self driving vehicle. Right?
Michael:So that's it's good. And right as the as the optimist, which we found out when you're talking to a psychologist there, those are all the good positive things. And, again, just for the audience, I'm 100% agreeing with you. I'm just playing from what I've heard from these people. So what do you say about the fear?
Michael:Right? So yes, you could drive way better. Like I've for one have been promised self driving cars for fifteen-twenty years now, I'm still waiting for them because I would love to, you know, take long road trips and be able to work or do something enjoyable at the same time. But the reason I think most people are adverse to it isn't because of the positives. I think that's an easy thing to make people see.
Michael:I think there's two things going on from the negatives that you'd have to address. One is that what happens if things go really bad, right? What happened if the bot goes haywire and, you know, I've got a $100,000 account and it somehow YOLOs the whole $100 into some shitty penny stock, and I've I lose, you know, 20% of my account before I can react. What's the steps that you have someone take to think about how to be more comfortable with it? What are some good precautionary measures?
Michael:If you've right, so now we've convinced the person, yeah, it's going to be better if you trade if a bot trades for you instead of you do it. How do you shore up that back end of these are the things that they're worried about?
Dave:Yeah. I think that's a great question. And there's lots of steps you can take. One of which would be then have the robot then trades to a paper trader and watch those and gain confidence over time and, you know, watch the trades in real time go there from this thing and and maybe do it like, one good step would be have it trade your exact system that you're trading discretionarily or something close, like as close as you can get to it, and just watch it go through the mechanics in real time on a regular basis to gain confidence in that. You know, there's something about watching something in real time and comparing it to something else and doing that routinely that builds confidence and helps you get over that hump.
Dave:As far as precautions, you know, IV has precautions built into Trader Workstation that address a lot of this. Like, it can there's settings you can put in there to prevent it trading more than a certain amount. You you can limit the size that it can take. So you so there are some precautions you can take to alleviate these concerns. And, you know, it's in IB's and the broker's best interest to not allow you to do this.
Dave:I mean, that's you know, to to to have these precautions, like, it's totally in their best interest to to try to give you tools to prevent you doing that.
Michael:Yeah. And one thing that I think, and basically something that Dave knows that I've been playing with a bit, trying to build a system in. And I think the easiest thing for me to do this as well from a fully day trading kind of automated standpoint, is you can give it a tiny amount. Now, I have the benefit of being Canadian where I could literally give it $1,000 and it can day trade $1,000 I know you guys have weird rules around that, but that would be one of my big recommendations too. If you want to feel how this thing works in the real world, take whatever the bare minimum you can put into the account and have that trade because then you're trading a real environment, your fills are going be real, you're going to see everything that's happening.
Michael:And then just like we talked about with everything, slowly start to add in, right? Maybe you put in $10, and and then you know if it goes absolutely crazy and goes nuts, you're you're losing $10. You'll be mad, but you know, you'll be fine. And then you just continue to add capital to it until eventually it's trading your full amount, and you by then, hopefully you've had a couple months experience kind of doing it. And then the other thing I think that kind of worries people that and this is just me completely speculating at this point.
Michael:There is a lack of not only even control, like you feel like you're replacing yourself. It's almost and for I know programmers in particularly, this is what you're always trying to do. Like programmers have this unique thinking of I'm doing a thing. Do I need to do the thing or can I have a robot do the thing? With us non programmer types, there's almost a feeling of, well, if I'm not placing the trades, then what's the good of me?
Michael:Right? And, you know, we've addressed this a bit, but I think specifically when it comes to robot trading, it'd be good to remind these people. And just full disclosure, Dave, I'm gonna be sending this exact podcast to those people next time I get I get pushback on this. Yeah.
Dave:Well, there's a lot there,
Michael:and I had a lot
Dave:of things I wanna respond with. One thing that I was just thinking about as you were talking. So it reminds me of something I learned a few years ago. You've heard the stat probably that, like, something like ninety percent of small businesses that start fail after five years or something, sorta like traders. Right?
Dave:But it's it's a it's a real thing. Mhmm. But do do you know what type of business has a much, much, much higher success rate and that doesn't fail at that rate? Can you give a guess? What do you think?
Michael:No, I can't. I think they I would just put them all in the same bucket, so this will be interesting.
Dave:Yeah. So the answer is franchise businesses. Now why would that be? Why would that be? Well, think about it.
Dave:You've got an owner who's in a regular small business, they're totally involved. Everything revolves around them. They're they're doing everything. With a franchise, they specifically design the business so that it doesn't revolve around one person. Everything's systematized.
Dave:Otherwise, there's no there's no way you're gonna get somebody to buy a franchise because the owner has to be involved. From the very beginning, that owner has made a choice to systematize everything about a business. And when you buy a franchise, you basically get a book of all the SOPs, all the standard operating procedures, like basically a blueprint for how to make money with this business. And that's the promise of successful trading, is you want to not only trade like a business, you want to trade like a franchise. That's when you're gonna be successful.
Dave:And I see that with all the traders I work with. The more they systematize, the better off they are and the more likely that they get they're gonna be successful.
Michael:That's interesting. Actually really like that example to push people on because it's one of those that what people tell you is their worry with it, I don't think is the actual worry. Really think and again, I'm speculating, but I really think that area of it is what's worrying people the most is a bit of bit of lack of control, I'm I'm taking my hands off the wheel, and I'm doing that, but a bit of where is my value if it's not in in placing the buttons and hitting the trade. So, to use a franchise example, well, if every you don't want to be doing the accounting and the procurement orders and all, right, get rid of all that. So then your value as a franchise owner should be thinking more about, well, how do I, you know, get in with the community or run certain specials or, you know, to take everything that's running potentially as well or machine, how do I push that to the next level, as opposed to just focusing on doing it and getting it alive and just in the day to day operation.
Michael:And that's again, for me, what I've really noticed when it's come to systematic trading is I had some of that that same fears that if I completely systematize everything, well, where is the you know, where is the place for me as someone who loves the process of of trading and analysis and all this kind of stuff? And what it's opened up to me is, well, doesn't right? I got a lot of stuff to do now still, right? The list of new systems to test and the things to tweak and everything is kind of ever growing and has, you know, more time than I'd ever take. But yeah, I really do think regardless of what people say, it's it's that it's the letting go, I think, that is the hardest part.
Dave:Yeah. I mean, think about think about McDonald's. How many ways are there to make a hamburger? There's probably dozens of ways to make a hamburger. Right?
Dave:But with McDonald's, there's one way, and they're really good at that one way of doing it. And it so just think about those two paradigms, like some artisan hamburger maker versus McDonald's. Which one do you think is gonna make more money? Right? The McDonald's is.
Dave:So it reminds me also of actually, when I was with Trade Ideas, and I had decided I was gonna leave. This is well ahead of when I left. And what I realized at the time was, you know, I was the CTO. I was in charge of a lot of stuff. I realized if I left, a lot of stuff was gonna fall apart.
Dave:I think they would have limped along, but I was in a position where I was company was too vulnerable because I was too heavily involved. And I made a decision at that point because because when I left, I I don't know, some people leave a job and they're like, man, I hope this place falls apart. Right? I wanted to I wanted to leave the the trade ideas in a way, way better position because of me having been there. I wanted to to be successful after I left.
Dave:So
Michael:The the campsite rule. Right? That's you know, you wanna leave Yeah. As as good if or or not better than when you got there. Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. I wanted to leave something that would continue to be successful when I left. So I set out to remove myself from day to day stuff, piece by piece, make little investments every day, to systematize things, to have other people do things that I was doing, you know, to have automated alerting when outages happened in a way that was very efficient and didn't have, you know, a single person on the hook for that, if they missed the call, like, there was an outage that a lot of people noticed. So I really but that was hard for me. Right?
Dave:Here, was kind of the man. Right? I had to give up control. I had to, you know, I had to pass off some of this stuff which I thought, you know, in my mind, was like, man, this is what I do. This is this is me.
Dave:Mhmm. And I had to give that off to other people to help the company grow and get into a better position. So I can understand the mindset, and it's it's a it's a hard thing to push through. But you kinda have to step back and think about, okay. What am I trying to do here?
Dave:What's the best value I can provide on this planet? Is it pointing and clicking and making orders? Probably not. Right? You're you're better than that.
Dave:You're bigger than that.
Michael:Well, I think you hit on something that that's really important. And we know trading is is way different from the corporate world. Most people, I think, get into trading at some sort of corporate job or something to start with. And there is that level of you want to dig yourself in this. I thought of this when you're talking, you wanted to kind of dig yourself into the company in a way that you're essentially not able to be replaced, right?
Michael:And that happens a lot. You see it a lot when you work at different places where, you know, this one guy will not let go of this one part of the job he does, because he kind of understands that as long as he's the only one that can do this thing, he's way harder to replace than anything else. And I think some of that gets carried over maybe to trading, and this could actually cause a lot of this friction where they're like, well, you know, I you know, I want to be the guy to do this thing. So I'm, I'm irreplaceable to it. And, you know, again, just thought about this while you're talking, well, you're your own boss now, right?
Michael:So you kind of want to replace that thing. Because I I've remembered working in different corporate jobs and having that feeling and saying, I need to I need to dig my hooks in here, because then all of a sudden, right, I'm way harder to get rid of. But because you're the owner operator and everything in the business, I think you should flip that thinking and just saying, okay, well, what can I let go of? What can I kind of put my hands off of so that, you know, I can replace myself essentially?
Dave:Yeah. It's easy to fall into that trap, especially when you're early in your career, you kind of think that that's the way to do it. I was I gave a talk last week to maybe a couple weeks ago to the honors program here at UNC, the local university, and they were one of the things I encouraged them was to think not about what would make you successful or when you go out and get a job, don't think about just what you're doing, how to make yourself successful. Think about how to make others around you successful. And that's it makes such a difference when from a leadership perspective, when you see that, good leaders recognize that and reward that.
Dave:They reward people that don't carve out a little silent for themself, a little fiefdom for themself to to make them, you know, to make themselves irreplaceable. So it's something that people recognize. Good leaders recognize that, and so it's it's important to understand that dynamic. So,
Michael:okay. So we figured out, I think mostly how to pull people into robotic trading. So, you know, for the people who are still very discretionary, I think just to summarize things you say, Okay, well, you can still pick the stock you want to trade. But if you like it at $10, just put out an order at $10, right, and walk away. Know, the this fully systematic guy, you got to think of, Okay, so much more you can be doing.
Michael:We haven't talked about, which is very interesting, which I think is the appeal to most people, when they get into this, is the emotional aspect, right? A lot of people, we talk about this all the time that systematic trading does not remove the emotions from trading, right? Nothing you will ever do will remove the emotions from it. But if you are someone and this is going to personal experience, if you're someone who is a revenge trader, right? You take a hit on a position and probably you were a little bit too begin big to begin with, and you want to, you know, re short that stock to get back in to make that money back.
Michael:Or if you're somebody who over trades, you trade at a boredom or whatever. These two areas in particular, I would say definitely help with a robot because for the revenge trading, there's a bit of detachment, right? A, the the trade will be sized appropriately, so you won't ever take a hit way bigger than you thought and feel the need to get back in. And then the when you watch the robot trade for long enough, it becomes way easier to say, okay, there will always be another trade, there'll always be another thing to do, and you're not doing those things at a boredom because you're not watching every tick of the market waiting to take a trade. It's just it's off somewhere, you're monitoring it, you're doing other things.
Michael:So other than those two, or a comment on those two, what emotional side of things would you say if if they're this type of trader that that a robot would help with?
Dave:Yeah. Well, I like to describe what you just talked about there as kind of the power of the default. So what do I mean by that? Well, when you're trading discretionarily, you're making you're taking these actions every trade that happens. Right?
Dave:So there's you there's some there's discretion about getting the position size. There's you're making decisions at every point. Right?
Michael:Yeah.
Dave:There's all sorts of ways to for an error to sneak in there, some mistake you can make. But the power of the default is you've got a robot. You've planned ahead of time, okay, this is the strategy I'm It's gonna do exactly these things. It's gonna size it in this way.
Michael:It's gonna
Dave:use these exit orders. Everything about that is already preplanned, and it's gonna be executing that by default. So if you're gonna make a mistake, you have to override that default. You have to go take some action to make the mistake rather than having that mistake be basically inherent in your process.
Michael:Yeah, and I think I think part of it too is, you know, you mentioned all the decisions you need to make in the audience can look it up and might be actually a really good podcast episode. But decision fatigue is a very well studied thing at this point, right? The the very famous example is Steve Jobs, right? Wearing the same thing every single day because he just every decision he could remove from his life, he found really, really beneficial so that when it was time to make decisions, he felt, you know, that happened. And again, there's been lots of studies and everything on this.
Michael:The more decisions a person has to make throughout a day, generally, as time goes on, the worst they get, the worst they get at making those decisions. It's generally why, you know, if we're going to cave on a diet or something that usually happens at night, after you're completely depleted from from that. So that's always my argument them as well. You know, if you again, if you want to be a discretionary trader, your decision should just be, I like this stock, right? This is the setup I like.
Michael:And then if you can systematize the right, yeah, where the stop loss goes, what the what the sizing is of it, where the profit target is, all that kind of stuff, then you've taken some thing that may, even though it's still discretionary, you may have had 10 to 15 decision points, and you've limited it now to just a handful. And if you repeat that over and over and over again throughout your trading career, you have made thousands of less decisions than the guy next to you. So the quality of those decisions should be, and I would imagine be way, way better.
Dave:Yeah. I like that. I mean, other thing I was thinking about as you're talking there is it's sort of like, you know, imagine being a baseball player on a baseball team and then compare that to being the general manager of the baseball team. Which person do you think can have the most impact on the success of, of the team itself? Oh, it's the general manager, but he's not, he's not out there catching balls and making pitches.
Dave:Right? He's, like, looking at the big picture and deciding what's best for this team, what's deciding how the players interact, and how to maximize the success of that that team. So it's kind of the same thing with your trading and your strategies. It's sort of leveling up what you're doing and looking at it from a management perspective versus being in the trenches and making orders. I mean, you can step back and make tweaks that affect the entire system, and that's gonna make you ultimately more successful.
Dave:It may take some time, but bring yourself up to think about the big picture and think about, you know, from these strategies and your trading career in general, I think it's gonna is a great thing to do.
Michael:Good. Well, listen, Dave, I thank you for this one in particular because now I have this. I'm gonna bookmark this somewhere. And every time I'm having the back and forth of this, instead of having to go through a lot of these same arguments that I've made myself, can just say, here, listen to this, and this will help you out. Because it's funny, it just naturally through technology, we seem to systematize so much more of our lives overall.
Michael:Like I just recently, actually this morning, I've decided I'm gonna just within ChatGPT, do all of my workouts, and all of the calorie tracking, and all that stuff in because I can just do it in a single bot, and I can just talk to it. I can say I just ate this, and then it adds it to the total and then sends it off. So there's a lot of technology that has seemingly just came into our life to make it simple. And we're very okay with adopting those technologies as they come in. I live in a small town, I still put Google Maps on for pretty much everything because it's going to know if there's a traffic jam over there or construction over here or whatever it is.
Michael:But for some reason, I've noticed in this community in particular, that automating of sitting and hitting the buttons to get in and out of trades, it just can't seem to shake people of it for whatever reason.
Dave:Yeah. It's I think it's pretty natural. I mean, like you said, there's there's a lot of technologies that come along. Like I mentioned, the ATM. I was thinking, you know, the automated tellers at the grocery store.
Dave:Right? There's every point when these things come out, people are resistant to it. People can't imagine their lives doing it that way. Then all of a sudden, you know, years later, everybody prefers going to the the automated teller at the grocery store, I
Michael:will wait in line to go to the automated teller before walking right through the other one because I know it'll be faster and I won't have to make chitchat and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. People end up preferring it, but at the when it first comes out, there's a little bit of an uproar, right? People have this status quo bias that they don't like to see things change.
Michael:Of the biases we learned in the CMT, that status quo bias was one that really, really got me, you know, just to explain the audience real quickly, it's just that so many studies done of people in a job and having opt in versus opt out things. You naturally sat down at your job, and they were going to do a IRA match, I think it is, or four zero one ks match for you guys, if they opted if you had to opt out of it, everybody did it. But if you had to opt into it, it was only like 30% of people did it, even though it's just you're filling out a piece of paper and you're ticking a box and sending it off that any barrier of entry was enough to cut out over half the people that were interested because they just don't want to people don't want to do anything.
Dave:Yeah, yeah, that's a good example of the power of the default. Right?
Michael:It's Yeah.
Dave:That's a it's another great example of it right there. But, I like this. This was a this is a good one, Michael.
Michael:That's a good one. So, I'll have this one in the bookmarks again. Tell us what what you think about this, whether or you're using a robot for trade, whether or you're interested in using a robot for trading. You know, obviously we'll have more to talk about with that in the future as well as, you know, I think it's paramount to systematic trading. So there'll be a lot more going on there.
Michael:And as always, I'm Michael Noss.
Dave:And I'm Dave May. Hope you join us next week on Line Your Own Pockets.
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