Why You Should Fully Automate Your Trading Strategy

If you’ve ever seen finance depicted on the big screen, you undoubtedly have an impression about how the system works.

Busy day traders bustle around crowded trading room floors, striking deals and making tons of money. It’s the action scene of so many financial dramas that it can start to feel like it’s the way the system actually works.

Of course, as so often happens, what’s depicted in the movies is much different than what happens in real life, especially when it comes to investment banking.

Today’s investment market is dominated by a different, less visible type of action. Automated trading, a catchall term for many types of algorithmically-driven trading strategies, is the name of the game.

For instance, JP Morgan estimates that only 10% of trading is executed through human-based stock selections, and it’s estimated that, on any given day, 80% of all stock grades are machine-led, which represents a significant shift in the nature of investing.

In the past decade, investment juggernaut Goldman Sachs has automated 99% of their equity trading jobs, making computer engineers a more typical component of their investment apparatus than actual bankers.

As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2017, under the declaratory headline…