I Tried Day Trading w/ a Trading Bot Algorithm

in this video i'm going to trade futures using an algorithm to see if this is a profitable way to make money in the stock market [Music] i am highly skeptical of any trading algorithm sold to retail traders the bottom line is why why would someone who can create a profitable algorithm share with other people you can simply scale up and make as much money as your risk tolerance allows algorithmic trading sounds incredibly smart and fancy but it's essentially just a computer program to automate the process of buying and selling financial instruments when certain conditions are met now to your average retail trader like myself this sounds ideal remove the indecision the missed setups the uncertainty and the emotions you could set your program up and have it run while you sleep late or at least that's how it seems and is often marketed just like that again i don't really think there will be something like this that works for the average retail trader but i'm willing to put real money online to find out okay so the algo i'll be using is a trading system i found on twitter i don't feel comfortable promoting it i don't want to be seen as shilling something or encouraging people to sign up but i also don't want to completely tear apart someone's business if i don't have success with it this is something that isn't widely advertised so i don't think it's duping thousands of people out of their hard-earned money it's developed by a woman named lauren who often posts her results and results for members on social media and to be honest it all sounds too good to be true results of a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars per day seem pretty common now being highly skeptical i actually tracked down a few people from the results screenshots she has posted because it just all sounds like bs to me i even thought that these accounts could just be fake ones that lauren created to make it look more successful than it is one guy who posted his results had a unique enough name that i was able to google it and find his website he was in a completely unrelated field and his website was definitely legit i emailed him and he was rightfully thrown off as to how i tracked him down but i will find you i told him i was just looking for an unbiased review from an actual member here's what he said lauren is epic i've been part of two of her trading rooms and platforms she's been doing it for years she works like crazy and is always fine tuning everything to get the most benefit for her crew patient with new people and detailed and forward thinking with the people that have been part of the crew for a while worth every penny happy to screenshot a piano alright that sounds pretty convincing but i decided to reach out to two more members one guy said he hasn't used it lately joined in the early stages where more testing was needed he didn't seem to have a strong opinion either way it sounded like he didn't make money with it but said lauren is constantly testing different strategies to make them more successful that seems like a pretty reasonable testimonial the last member i asked said she definitely thought it was worth the money and she has been having success with the alco hands off so that's two random members saying yes it was worth the money and a third who had somewhat neutral feedback he didn't think it was an hour scam but it also sounded like he didn't have great results with it with that i decided to give it a shot here's the thing it's very expensive a thousand bucks per month so if i ever do a brand deal on this channel you know it's just to pay for stuff like this anyway there are uh several other fees you have to consider as well lots of brokerages won't let you run automated trading strategies like this the only one that works for this one is ninjatrader which is a feature-centric broker so with a new brokerage you have to pay for live data this is 12 per month then in order to run the i'll go on ninjatrader you either need to buy a lifetime license or lease it which is 225 every three months and that's not all ninjatrader runs on windows and all my computers are mac so i could use something like parallels to run it but lauren recommends using a vps or a virtual private server this means you get your own server space somewhere on a server farm with your own login to a windows machine even if you have windows the benefit here is more stable computer with a more reliable internet connection you wouldn't want to be trying to run the algo and your computer goes to sleep or your wi-fi gets interrupted so this service is like 50 bucks a month so all in you're spending 1 seven dollars per month without placing a trade that is pretty wild the bright side for me is lauren does have an intro offer where she'll give you access for three weeks for five hundred dollars so all in for this experiment i am putting in 787 dollars plus i'm going to load my ninjatrader account with two thousand dollars [Music] once i signed up there was a lot to learn first i've never used ninjatrader before so it's a completely new platform for me then there's downloading the strategies from lauren uploading them to ninjatrader and customizing the settings she has like four different core strategies that you can run on any features instrument and then there are a few videos to watch about getting set up and she has a whole spreadsheet with custom settings depending on the instrument you want to run it on so i spent the first afternoon just getting acclimated with the platform and setting up the settings and everything the next day was friday and i was still waiting for my server to get set up so i didn't try running the i'll go i decided to wait until [Music] monday here's how it works every night lauren posts which strategies she's running on which instruments other members follow suit posting what strategies they are running it's up to you to run whatever you want but lauren recommends beginners start out on her 15-minute range strategy on the nasdaq features contract and q since i have a small account i will be running these strategies on the micro contract not the mini limits the micro is one tenth of its mini counterpart oh and none of the fees i mentioned earlier take into account commissions and fees of actually entering and exiting trades for micro nasdaq futures it's 72 cents so for a round-trip trade it's a dollar 44. this range strategy is quite simple as far as i can tell it's essentially just an opening range break trade after a set period of time after the market open a trading range is established and once price moves outside of it in either direction the algo will take a trade there may be more minutia involved but i believe that's the core of it the settings for these strategies do get updated fairly often which is good lauren is tweaking things as the market conditions change which is definitely something i'd want to see one other thing i'll point out in ninjatrader this is my home screen like everyone else in this algo group i have a simulation account which is the first row you can run different strategies on the sim account to test things out which is great below that is my real money account so i've got 100k of paper money and my 2 000 real money account below and in case you are new to futures futures are not restricted by the pdt rules so you can take as many trades as you want with less than 25 000 as long as you meet the intraday margin requirements of your broker [Music] all right sunday night i think i just got everything set up right i'm hoping that tomorrow morning it'll start running and if there's a trade it'll take it i have it running on the mnq on the 15 minute chart in my real money account and i also have one other strategy running in my simulation account just to see how that one performs i'll check in when i have some results [Music] so my first day of running the algo there was not a trade on the mq range strategy i was running so the algo did not take a trade in my real money account and that's fine if the setup isn't there then there's no [Music] trade so for the next day i wanted to run another instrument just to make sure we get enough trades in this experiment so i decided to run a newer trend strategy lauren developed on mym which is the dow micros and now i slept in and woke up around 8 pacific to see iago took some trades and i was up 72 on the day and that was a pretty cool feeling to actually make money while i slept but what i noticed was it took a lot of trades so i did pay about 18 in peace and commissions and what i realized is i actually set the strategy up wrong i had it on a one minute chart which is why it took so many trades instead it was supposed to be on a line break chart which is something i was not familiar with so i was glad i got away in the green despite my mistake throughout the day other algo members will post their trading results and i noticed a lot of people were doing really well trading oil so i decided to add mcl which is micro oil features to the algo and this time i woke up in the red ym and q were losses and oil was my only winner but not enough to outweigh the red altogether i lost 88 [Music] i decided to add an es strategy that's the s p futures contract this utilizes the range breakout strategy i've been running on nq the algo took trades on ym es and cl ym was an 11 winning trade es was a massive loser dropping me 246 but luckily oil mitigated those losses with 194 profit so unfortunately this was another red day losing about 48 i wish i would have left es at home today was a rough one nq and cl were both pretty big losers making it a 419 red day which is especially rough on a small account at one point i was in an oil trade that was green but i really didn't want to withstand any more losses to this account so i manually moved my stop loss into profit to ensure it wouldn't go red throughout this experiment i'm really not trying to make any manual adjustments and just letting the algo do its thing but i did make an exception here one thing that can be especially frustrating is when you have a red day and you see other members posing their results and well they're a lot different than yours in a situation like this you just have to look and see what strategies they're running and some members will manually exit trades early or after some green trades we'll switch off their real money account and change it to simulation but if this is being marketed as a make money while you sleep type system i want to be profitable without having to be watching the trades making my own adjustments etc maybe that's too much to ask but for the cost i think that's what it should be like after the first week my account is at 1 518 for a 482 dollar net loss meanwhile my simulation account is up 500 to add a little insult to injury it's a bit frustrating given the cost of running this algo on top of the losses so hopefully the next two weeks are a little better [Music] unfortunately the next week did not get off to a better start iago took some trades on nq for a loss of 74 the next day it took a trade on nq that was a loss of 22 the following day more of the same 105 loss with nq and a 40 loss and then thankfully friday was a holiday so no trades then [Music] the second week i lost about 240 taking my account under 1300 i'm certainly a bit discouraged lauren messaged me saying it was not a good week for the rain strategy in this market which yeah i noticed she said she kind of sort of recommends running the trend strategy on dow or russell futures so i might try that i am certainly starting to lose any faith i had in this trading system but i have a few more training days left before my three week access expires so let's get it over with [Music] i decided to run a strategy with the russell but i just ran the mini not the micro so it was a bit risky to do with a small account i did get my first green day in a while locking in 44 of profit [Music] and then what do you know but the impact of the mini russell came back to bite me i lost 325 with rty at least nq finally had a winning trade making me 65 back but i still ended the day in the whole 261 today was interesting i woke up to a margin call dialogue box in ninjatrader apparently i did not have the required cash to take the trade on rty which is strange because the margin requirement is 500 and i have over 1 000 but this one especially sucks because the russell went on a nice run and it would have been a really solid trade you can see ninja shows an unrealized gain of almost four thousand dollars but that's not really accurate it essentially recorded me as entering the trade but since i didn't have enough margin the trade was never live and thus my take profit and stop loss levels that the algo would normally enter weren't there but it does look like it would have been a terrific trade i'm just not sure why the margin requirement was more than 500 nq made me about 65 in profit but ninja charges a 25 fee for not having enough margin which is rude so after all that i was left with 40 profit [Music] so for my last day of trading i ditched the russell and went back to only nq making 65 in profit all right so after 14 days of running the algo it took 137 trades with roughly a 55 win rate but my average winning trade was 36 dollars and my average loser was 63 the average trade time was 20 minutes and i don't think commissions are calculated correctly on the platform so going off of my last broker statement i have 1 164 left in my account resulting in a total loss of 836 but given the cost of everything i mentioned at the beginning of this video this total experiment cost me a total of one thousand four hundred and seventy three dollars but here's where things get interesting i use ninjatrader's strategy analyzer feature which allows you to easily back test whatever strategies you want so while the main strategy i ran with nq wasn't profitable running the newer trend based strategy with the micro nq contracts would have resulted in a net profit of over 9 000 and again it's not taking into account commissions but you could just take the number of trades 237 and multiply by the commission cost so in this instance it's still extremely profitable but i do believe the strategy analyzer usually gives an overly optimistic result than trading live but even if this is remotely correct this is pretty intriguing so if you want me to give this a shot for one more month let me know in the comments below i think there is a bit of a learning curve to take into account and of course being more conservative with your risk by not trading minis when you should be in micros nice self-awareness while this wasn't profitable for me i'm not sure i'm ready to throw in the towel i do think lauren is trying her best to test and develop strategies that work as market conditions change i do wish it was a little bit more affordable though it's just a lot of money to put at risk for something that may or may not work out as you saw here with my experiment it does seem like the majority of members are having success with it so maybe it just takes some time to figure that out i also thought it'd be interesting to use a funded account with the algos so once you find strategies that work you can amplify your results i don't know just something to consider anyways i hope you enjoyed this video i will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Daniel Inskeep

Views: 584,206

Keywords: personal finance, daniel inskeep, making money online, day trading, algo, algo trading, algorithm, automated trading, ninjatrader, trading futures, trading stocks, day trader, stock market, how to day trade, stock trading, day trading bot

Id: lQlWlrdGaz0

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022