Regarding "actually making money"... my 2 cents: I have worked diligently for more than 10 years, trying just about every trading style (position trading, swing trading, daytrading) and every trading vehicle (stocks, commods, futures, options), and finally settled on swing trading of stocks about 5 years ago. Swing trading fits my style, temperament and available time. Your results may vary.
I purchased a few proven systems and then used them as a starting point for developing my own. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has taken tens of thousands of hours of experimentation and backtesting (and many more tens of thousands of dollars of losses), to reach a point where I can make consistent profits - with a system I can trust and not second-guess. This was an important milestone for me - having systems that I KNEW would work IF (and only if) I didn't mess with them. When you can reach that trust and comfort level, autotrading is not necessary. A new development: until a few weeks ago, I was using the entire universe of stocks, filtered for setups each day with price, volume, volatility (etc.) constraints. I was profitable, but it occurred to me that I might high-grade my trades by focusing on stocks constrained by things like institutional sponsorship, relative strength, earnings growth and such. You may recognize these as some of the constraints touted by Invstors Business Daily, Navellier and the like. Now, my universe of stocks is only about a thousand stocks (fewer trades), but I was able to offset this by easing up on my setup criteria. The results are very pleasing - approx. 30% more profit per trade. To ease my stock selection using fundamental data, I switched daily data providers, from Worden Bros. to Quotes Plus / Stock Picker Pro. QP/SPP has almost every fundamental bit of information available AND has internal Ranking (0-99) for such things as EPS, Relative Strength and Group Strength. These data can either be called in Amibroker, or QP/SPP can filter and supply a list which can easily be pasted directly into an AmiBroker watchlist. When I used IBD's online data for stock selection, it was a bit more difficult. Using their columnar results in Excel, I had to add a comma after each symbol and then transpose the list into a row for pasting into AmiBroker. btw I have no affiliation with Quotes Plus / Stock Picker Pro. and have no beef with Worden Bros. I am, however, a huge fan of Amibroker. Without this program, I could not have gotten here. I am grateful for it and have touted it at every opportunity. Now, I am also a fan of Quotes Plus. I wanted to share my experience so that others who may not have traveled as far down this path might know that it is definitely not easy - but it IS possible to actually make money. And I have certainly learned that there is always one more thing to try and test - the challenge of trading and the satisfaction of using Amibroker. Good luck and good trading.
