I mean, can you explain sort of how they go about it?

Yeah, you know, they have a very well thought out curriculum that they teach new traders.

And, you know, it's...

I think discretionary trading is pretty difficult to do, especially for just average people.

I mean, I know I can't do it very well.

I have to have a system.

I have to have rules in place before I take the trade.

I mean, what about other ones that didn't do so well and other ideas and potentially how somebody would create their own strategy and build up a strategy?

So how can one approach being more concise when working AI into their process? What does a concise prompt look like in practice versus an amateur query?

Yeah, so an amateur query might be, okay, how do I create a profitable trading strategy, right? That's a way too broad a question.

There's so many ways to answer that question.

A much better approach would be like, figure out the trades that you've made that have worked and figure out some process around that some some tedious part of your process that you use to when you make a trade and think and ask ai to figure out okay let's let's work with ai to figure out a way to automate that or streamline that a good example is A lot of newbie traders just don't get position sizing right, and it's so important to get that correct.

That's what professional traders do, and they do it very well.

They had an absolutely down pat.

so you know if you've ever had a string of trades that have gone really well and then one trade that all of a sudden you know you lose all your gains it's typically because you don't have your position size again so that's a really good sort of bite-sized project to work with ai to figure out okay exactly how should i be doing my position sizing maybe give it some examples of what you've traded in the past and how many shares you've you've traded and it can really help you come up with a much better process that will help you from this point forward come up with better sizing.

So Dave, outside of just giving some previous example trades and sizing, what specifically can someone do to help train AI to help with this concise query? I mean, what parameters should an investor be feeding into AI to try to determine this? Or is it a risk per trade? Does volatility matter here? Are you looking at drawdown limits? I mean, what parameters need to be set to use this properly?

So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Yeah.

systematic traders will sometimes get stuck in what I call backtest world, where they're just looking at the data, they only believe the data, and they're really missing the intuitive piece that a lot of discretionaries have in spades.

The real good collaborations I see are with discretionary traders and systematic traders working together.

Like collaborations are super important.

You know, a lot of traders are really secretive about what they do, but really the best traders look back on their career and wish they'd have shared more.

So I want to see your thoughts on that and how the whole algorithms have infiltrated the retail side of the market, especially in small caps.

Is there a way to paper trade before putting real money at risk?

Yes.

So this is one of the very underrated things about the Interactive Brokers API.

In the order properties for the orders that you're using in the API that you're sending using a, the computer, there's a property there called transmit, and what this allows you to do is it's a bullion, so you can either set it to true or false.

So with paper trading, like, there, also another thing is you have a free paper trading account that's included with your normal account, so you can send orders to your paper trading account a- just exactly as you would a live account.

So you can test there.

Then the next stage, so once you get that process working, there's even another feature of the API that is really convenient.

And they ask the question, "Well, what's the big advantage? What, what, what, what does IBKR do that other people don't do? What are the advantages of IBKR's API over others, Dave?"