A company like Xavier McAllister Capital would rely on staff to trade its assets, but increasingly, automated trading robots are a focus on trading activities of the company. One of the principles and partners of the firm has been able to leverage a software development background into providing software solutions that can potentially reduce its dependence on human traders. That being said, human resources still play a vital role in the accomplishment of sound trading principles, but one should not overlook the potentials and gains that can be made with trade robots.
For example, the X-Cross scalper automates a simple strategy that has been in use in the company for about 9 months. Known as the XAV770, a simple moving average cross over strategy, enhanced with targets means traders do not necessarily have to spend time staring at the screens.
Prior to this, we built the XAV900 battle software. This robot was a straddle application which would place opposite trades and automatically apply “One Cancels The Other” techniques. This initially gave good results, but as it was based on trading high impact market news, Covid-19 affected the market structure, as well as the trade strategy that it was based on. Automating trade strategies has its benefits, but it is in no way a silver bullet.
When we look at the figures, orders entered without human intervention were two-thirds of the market last year, up from 46 per cent. Robots and automation have brough benefits to investors that take short positions.
Our latest robot, the X-Cross Scalper is currently in semi-automatic mode i.e. orders are placed when the market conditions and logic is right – but traders still have to monitor the continuous trends in an unstable market. In effect, the X-Cross Scalper is not a sit back and let the money roll in approach. It’s merely a tool that gives the trader an edge above some others.