Has anyone made real money yet?

Have I made money? No, because I've never traded using real money!  I currently have two paper trading systems on here live trading.  I'm planning to wait 90 days before switching to real money depending on how they do.  

A few simple things you can do when building a system:

• When developing a system, limit the sample time period to where you only get say 200 to 400 trades.  
• Look for a low max drawdown, a high winning percentage, and a good profit-loss ratio.  Ignore annual return and net profit.
• Once you think you've got a winner, test it with an "out of sample" time period for the same ammount of trades and compare the results.  Are they the same? better? worse? This will give you a good idea if you're curve fitting your system.
• Paper trade it for the next 90 days or next 100 trades.  You can follow it in realtime to make sure its doing as expected.  Also look for communication errors with your broker.  Any unexpected results?
• Finally, if none of the above steps blow up your system, you might consider using real money.  If you do, run a parallel paper trading system along with your real money system and compare the results.  Are you getting good fills?  Any slippage?  

Other things to consider are money management, risk of ruin, Pattern Day Trader rules (less than $25K), settlement rules(T+3), and margin requirements.  

Please don't think it's even remotely possible to achive 3-5% per day reliably under any circumstances. If a trader is able to achive 3% compounded daily they could go from $1000 to ~$48 million dollars in just 1 year. There would be a lot of Trillionaires walking around if that were possible. MA crossovers are a joke indicator and you really shouldn't rely on them for anything more than fun money.

I have made about 16% of real money so far in about 6 months, just using my algorithm to trade index ETF's in my retirement fund through interactive brokers (IB). It's not sexy, or fast AT ALL, but it's real. You shouldn't be measuring your returns in daily %, you should be thinking about your yearly % gains and having lower drawdowns (higher sharpe ratio). Slow and steady wins the race because having huge drawdowns like -50% destroys your long term gains and eventually will wipe out your account given enough time.

Hi Tyler,

I have been working since september on my bot. With a portfolio Cashbook in BTC. I have been struggling a lot of times. Working on the bot during the days and evenings even sometimes during the night. But Finally I just placed my bot Live for 3 days now. Already placed 10 trades and sold 6 of them with profit and rest is still open.

2 tips I want to give is that you have to persevere and don't be shy to ask something in the community. Stupid questions don't excist! The QuantConnect Team helps a lot and good. 

Good luck programming the bot!!

Greetings,

David

Yes 46% for 2020  using only ETF's. I have one margin account and one retirement account running the same algorithm. I'm trying to get a second retirement account up and running soon. 

not many if any real success stories it looks like