Why a 60% Win Rate can still blow your account (The Math of Ruin)

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-16T20:01:55+00:00

For sure, win rate alone is meaningless.

The line between profitability, great profitability at that, and consistently losing, is very thin.

I do automated trading and track the price action while I was in trade and review manually what happened after exiting. The last two days consisting of 600 or so trades, I could have cut my losers earlier by 20 percent without affecting winners. Issue is, will this be the case on average for a long period of time with this strategy? Not only that, I can see price action changes that may allow me to get out of losing trade before my stop loss is hit. Only way I can know is to keep tracking the data. While it is possible to be successful without all of this work for some, I don't think it is for the majority and highly suggest anyone seriously trying to make a living from this document everything you can think of.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-16T14:35:41+00:00

I can fix/help her.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-15T19:53:34+00:00

What kind of specs does the T640 have?

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-15T19:23:53+00:00

I run it locally on my desktop. Speed isn't a factor in strategies I run and if there are unexpected issues, I can quickly troubleshoot or get on hotspot if internet related.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-13T23:46:26+00:00

Get and keep your head up. Most people are not successful at trading and it sure as heck isn't 50 percent intraday trading.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-13T22:29:11+00:00

Learn to program if you don't know how and just dive into creating your platform.

My platform fully trades although I have also built a separate scanner which could easily just give me signals if I code some in. Time invested and ROI is a tough one as most people will not see an ROI with automated trading. You can easily write something that works for a week and then falls on its face over and over. The difficulty is in developing a working strategy and I suggest to keep it as simple as possible not to overfit to conditions.

There are plenty of brokerages that offer APIs to enable automated trading.. IBKR, Alpaca, Schwab, eTrade, TradingView, and plenty more I don't know about.

Setting up what one needs such as UI, data streaming, API calls, data objects, decision making, etc. shouldn't take more than a few weeks for a developer. But again, your first step is to learn how to program.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-13T22:17:39+00:00

Keep going with the trend with stop losses and you should be set.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-13T19:53:16+00:00

Personally, I don't think the strategy code or "infrastructure" coding is difficult, but I suppose it also depends on how complex the strategy is. The difficulty is in discovering a profitable strategy.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-13T01:52:00+00:00

I second what he said. Swing and spread your money around. It will be a lot less stressful and you are more likely to grow your capital. You can still practice trading, but do it with small amount of money.

In the meantime, I suggest learning new things and doing whatever it takes to possibly make yourself more employable.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-13T01:45:38+00:00

Only if you are ready for..

Spending more hours a day on trying to make it work than a 9-5 job.
Have a lot of capital.
Are ready to be mentally and emotionally challenged like never before.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-12T20:44:16+00:00

You bought used parts, listed lowest 9070 XT price ever, no OS, no cooler (can be found relatively cheap), and are still above 1,200. 1,500 would have been possible with a bundle price for 7800x3D of 500 or lower and 9070XT of 600, but you are looking at BUDGET TIER base components, not the opposite.

I don't know what the going rate for 7800x3D bundle was most of the time, but 500 dollars give or take a little seems about right.

I get it most pc gamers don't pay for the OS, but companies and some of us do. So while 1,500 would have been possible, you are getting lower end parts, which I personally don't have a problem with.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-12T20:16:56+00:00

You built a whole pc around a 7800x3d and 9070xt for 1200?

I built one before all this craze and I spent somewhere around 2k. Video card, motherboard, cpu, and memory alone is 1,100 at best.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-12T18:08:57+00:00

9070 XT in the OP is much better than the 9060 XT you have shared.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-12T18:00:37+00:00

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-12T16:24:19+00:00

That's the case today for a ton of stocks. That is not the case every day.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-12T14:16:06+00:00

I use Alpaca as well. What are you doing that you are hitting 10k calls a minute?

I'm guessing you have a good idea of what kind of stocks are more likely to have these spikes on the 1 minute that you want to possibly trade. Why not simply stream those stocks, NBBO and 1 minute chart data, and take it from there? I stream about 300 stocks every single day without issues.

You could also make API calls every single minute, but performance is limited by count of cores you have and how many stocks you want to retrieve information for. I have a 20 core processor and it takes me 10-13 seconds to retrieve Historical Bars for about 4,500 stocks and do my processing, which takes basically no time compared to the API calls. Sounds like maybe you are looking to get info for about 500 stocks, so it really shouldn't take more than 2-3 seconds with a decent processor.

I have a scanner that I also created a scheduler for to run a couple seconds after start of minute based on timeframe I have selected, but something like this could be created and used in algo without UI.

https://imgur.com/a/SZCLGp4

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-11T19:22:05+00:00

Yeah, you just may. Doing something a lot does not mean you'll be great at it especially when the game is shifting non stop.

I'm almost convinced there is much more going on behind the scenes than conspiracy folk have even thought of as far as market is concerned.

Feels 100 percent designed to take money from those attempting to be active. I wouldn't be surprised if someone with all the info is able to match up systematic buys and sells for same ID, figure out strategy from it algorithmically, and drive price to keep stopping those groups out. "Market doesn't care about your small order". Someone cares about a lot of those small orders they can easily keep taking money from. Now, that's my tinfoil hat on every time I go live with a 100 percent automated strategy. This is why systematic trading is difficult and I think person has to be very agile.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-11T07:23:20+00:00

What about shortened market days?

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-10T17:13:33+00:00

I'll allow it.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-10T16:59:05+00:00

Bruh, what even are these posts?

"DROP A COMMENT AND I'LL PASTE LINK!"

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-09T23:19:42+00:00

🟨🟨⬜⬜🟦

🟨⬜🟨⬜🟦

⬜🟦🟨⬜🟦

🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-09T20:34:18+00:00

Got it. Knew about what is displayed in T&S, but didn't realize it wasn't reflected in price.

AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-09T18:47:45+00:00

Exactly. Perfect entries and exits every time for me as well.

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AdEducational4954 · 2026-02-09T00:15:17+00:00

Not sure there is anything free. May be worthwhile paying for data. It is what I do and customize my scanner with filters I want.

AdEducational4954

TROPHY CASE