I wanted to poll the senior user community of the forum: how do you automate your trading... and would like to ask for some advice in this regard as well.
My experiences (throughout roughly 3-4 years with the software):
- So far it seems to me, that Portfolio Trader up to v12 eventually would always run into memory errors if running a certain amount of charts - 60-80, sometimes more, sometimes less. Autotrading would shut down without notification, sometimes the software itself becomes unstable. Also, it barely matters how much RAM you have, it just seems to eat it all up eventually. Is this congruent with your experience?
- With MCv14 according to my testing, the problem got even worse. At least now the memory exception is handled - I was running 28 charts (about 15 of them with 750 lookback on 5 min), and within a few days I would get an "STD error: out of memory" red message, and autotrading would stop with unmanaged trades open on the broker side. There would also be a lingering MC Portfolio.exe process claiming all the memory of the machine I'm using it on (which is not much but is still 32 GB - and the history was 50 days, so there's no reason for it, really). I suspect there's a new memory leak somewhere. In any case, I'm starting to feel like PT is not an appropriate for live trading when it comes to a sizable account.
- Some competing products also use "in case of disconnect" and "in case of reconnect" functionality which lets you take action in case of certain events. Here, it seems like you have to handle everything manually, and you can't even auto-start the software after a reboot or something, in case it stops because of the legal notice you have to approve every time. It is a spectacularly annoying limitation of the software - I just don't understand what am I supposed to do. Hire people from India for 24/7 monitoring so there is always a human ready to click the ***** legal notice?
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
- I have some friends who are saying - just open everything on its own chart and it's going to be SUPER stable. You put the instrument, you put the strategy on it, you turn autotrading on, and it runs, on 50-100 charts, with 4 GB of RAM (!!) for literal years without ever having to touch it. Is this congruent with you guys experience? The problem here is if somebody is running a portfolio of 600 or 1000 strategies. I guess at some point you would say MC is just not the right software for it... But still I'd really love to hear about your experience on this.
- I know some people including some fund managers who use third party software to submit trades. They just open charts, don't even turn autotrading on, just let it run real time, and submit orders from the signals. I guess it's a very stable option - but again, there's a limit to the amount of strategies you can reasonably manage like that..
Anyway - I'm a little bit frustrated with this situation. Your advice on this would be very much appreciated.
Thank you,
-Ben