Fully automating your trade execution directly from Excel to your broker is one of the final steps toward creating a “trading robot”. However, it is very important to test your trading model and Internet connection thoroughly before allowing it to send live orders to the market. A minor glitch in your model or a Internet connection failure can result in substantial losses.
Here are a few key rules to fully automated trading:
- Your Internet connection should be fully redundant so you don’t lose connectivity during the trading day.
- You should set up a connection monitoring and alert process.
- You need to code your model to accept messages back from your broker’s system. For example, if an order gets rejected or is executed at a different price than your model thinks, it is easy for your trading model and your actual account to diverge.
As you can see, automating trade execution does not eliminate every problem with trade orders, and actually requires you to be more accurate because there is no opportunity to catch mistakes before your orders sent to the market!
