Pro-Trading-Profits: Auto Trade

Autotrading is without doubt one of the great innovations of online trading in recent years. It allows your selected service advisor to effectively trade your brokerage account for you, even though they never have access to it. As you'll see on our SearchRank facility, you can search our database according to those services that offer autotrading. If you're not familiar with it, here's how it works:


Choose the advisory service that you want to use. Doing this first is important because different services have autotrade arrangements with different brokers. As much as possible, you'll want to keep your funds spread between as few brokers as you can. And while most services have autotrade arrangements with a number of different brokers, you may not want to open a new brokerage account for each advisory service.		Open an account with one of your service's designated brokers, and then find out from your brokerage how to get set up for autotrading. There is no set way of doing this and each broker will have it's own requirements so make sure you find out how each one operates (and don't assume they are all the same because they're not). Once you're set up, you will be able to nominate not only which advisory service you'll be autotrading but also which specific trading system of theirs you want to use (if they have several, which many of them do).		Once you have completed Steps 1 & 2, you can define how much of your account is traded each time a recommendation is sent from your advisor to your broker. While the available parameters will vary from broker to broker, in general you will be able to choose from: a specific dollar amount a specific dollar amount specific number of contracts percentage of the cash available a percentage of your buying power a percentage of your total account value or the specific service recommendation You will also be able to decide whether to allow the advisor to close out the trade or if you want to do this yourself.

If you have never traded before or are unfamiliar with online trading, then auto-trading is a great first step to familiarize yourself with the market. You really do have full control over the process at all times and, as you can see, you can tailor the settings as you choose. And you might also want to read what the SEC has to say about auto-trading - click here to read their article.