What I expected from automating my trading vs what actually happened, point by point
Here's my honest scorecard of what I thought automating would do against what it actually did.
Some of these I got badly wrong.
I thought it would free up my day. True, and it's the biggest single benefit.
Not immediately though. The first few months took more time than trading manually did, because I was building and fixing constantly.
After that, genuinely yes.
I thought it would remove emotion. Partly true.
It removed emotion from execution, which is where the damage was happening.
It did not remove emotion from me. I still feel every drawdown. I just can't act on it as easily, and it turns out that's most of what I actually needed.
I thought I'd need to code. Less than I expected to get something running.
Much more than I expected to run it reliably. The gap between "it works" and "I trust this unattended" is almost entirely engineering rather than trading.
I thought I could set it and walk away. No.
Not because it needs watching minute to minute, but because things change around it. Contracts roll. Platforms update. Connections drop.
Maintenance is small but it never reaches zero, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't run one through a rollover week yet.
I thought results would be smoother. Wrong, in an interesting way.
The results aren't smoother. My behaviour is smoother, so the results now reflect the strategy instead of reflecting my mood.
I'd been treating those as the same thing.
What I didn't expect at all was how much of the work would be about failure.
Most of what I've built since month one has nothing to do with entering trades.
If you want the unvarnished version of how ours actually performs, we publish every session at livepropfirmtrading.com, red days included, using one fixed method I locked in writing so I can't quietly change it in a bad month.
Which of your expectations turned out furthest from reality?
Posted Aug 18, 2026, 12:05 PM UTC