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The Auto Pilot Day Trading Strategies

Benefits of Autotrading vs. Manually Trading

Auto Pilot Day Trading strategies are designed for short-term relatively small target trades and often take tens of trades a day.

  1. You can sit back and let the computer do the work for you, avoiding common execution errors.
  2. The quickest route to success is to find a good trading strategy and then follow the rules exactly. If you can avoid interfering with the strategy, you WILL follow the rules when you autotrade.
  3. In a fast-moving market, entry signals come very fast and it can be difficult to manually enter orders quickly enough to get into a trade. With autotrading, this is no longer a concern.
  4. You can easily trade several strategies simultaneously, each on a different instrument (for example, ES, ER2 and YM). This would be quite a juggling act if you were trading manually

NOT a Black Box

Our strategies are NOT black boxes. You are provided with all the inputs to the strategies along with descriptions, and you can adjust to fit your trading style. Also, if you have a good idea you'd like to see incorporated into the strategies, we will often try it out; we are always working to improve our strategies.

In addition, we regularly re-optimize charts that have begun to lose effectiveness and are continuously working on new charts. Strategies that are successful today may not do well 6 months from now. That is just the nature of the market and the reason black box systems often have short life spans.

The best strategy is one that works in all market conditions, that shows consistent new highs without significant drawdowns, and that makes the trader "feel good" - that is, does not have such wide stops or other parameters that a trader gets nervous trying to follow the strategy.

We have kept this in mind as we have developed our strategies.
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Damage Control

Each of the strategies described below may reduce the target amount to nearly breakeven if the trade starts going against us far enough to warrant the change, for damage control. All trades also have stop market order protection.

Money Management

Our strategies use time-of-day, profit/day target and loss/day stops, as well as number of contracts traded for equilibrium among the instruments traded. Read here about our automated approach to Money Management.

Jackpot, Rocket (with-the-trend)

The Jackpot and the Mini-Jackpot strategies look for short term trend trades in the Dow Emini (YM) and Russell 2000 Emini (ER) with profit targets of 9 to 25 ticks. They incorporate trailing stops, so that even if a trend doesn't continue, the trade can often exit with a small profit or perhaps a small loss. These trades normally use limit orders for entry and exit, although in a "surge" (when the price is moving up quickly or down quickly) they may use a market order to enter trades. The targets are always limit orders.

MiniJackpot on the ER 150 tick chart shown below, with two trades
that reached the targets and two trades that took damage control.

Ranger (support and resistance)

The Ranger strategy identifies areas of temporary support and resistance in relatively choppy markets by observing where price seems to have topped or bottomed out in the very recent past. We currently only apply the Ranger strategy to the S&P 500 Emini (ES). When successful, a long Ranger trade buys near the bottom of a bar and exits with a scalp profit (4 or 5 ticks on the ES) near the top of the same or next couple of bars. A short Ranger trade does the same thing — sells near the top of a bar and covers near the bottom of the same or next couple of bars. Rangers use limit orders for both entry and targets.

Ranger on the ES 987 tick chart shown below,
with a number of winning trades for the morning.

Go here to read about optimizing the strategies.

GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS REQUIRE DISCLOSURE OF THE FACT THAT WHILE THESE METHODS MAY HAVE WORKED IN THE PAST, PAST RESULTS ARE NOT NECESSARILY INDICATIVE OF FUTURE RESULTS. WHILE THERE IS A POTENTIAL FOR PROFITS THERE IS ALSO A RISK OF LOSS. A LOSS INCURRED IN CONNECTION WITH TRADING FUTURES CONTRACTS CAN BE SIGNIFICANT. YOU SHOULD THEREFORE CAREFULLY CONSIDER WHETHER SUCH TRADING IS SUITABLE FOR YOU IN LIGHT OF YOUR FINANCIAL CONDITION SINCE ALL SPECULATIVE TRADING IS INHERENTLY RISKY AND SHOULD ONLY BE UNDERTAKEN BY INDIVIDUALS WITH ADEQUATE RISK CAPITAL.

Any advisory or signal generated by Auto Pilot Day Trading, LLC  is provided for educational  purposes only. Any trades placed upon reliance on Auto Pilot Day Trading, LLC systems are taken at your own risk for your own account. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. While there is great potential for reward trading commodity futures, there is also substantial risk of loss in all commodity futures trading. You must decide your own suitability to trade. Future trading results can never be guaranteed. This is not an offer to buy or sell futures, options or commodity interests.