Community › Automated Trading

What do you do with the time automation gives you back?

ZenTrader_Ana· Jul 2026 ago· 👍 6· 💬 9
Nobody warns you about this part. I automated to get my day back, and then spent the recovered hours watching the same screens I'd been freed from, just with less to do. It took me a while to treat the free time as the actual point rather than a side effect. Now the rule is that once the session is running I'm not allowed to sit in front of it. I go do the research I never had time for, or I go outside. Curious what others did with it, if anything. It felt strange at first, like I wasn't working.
ZenTrader_Ana
12 posts · 0 followers
+ Follow

Related reading

Automated Tradingmy rule: the bot gets one bad night, not twoAutomated Tradingthe last print lied to me for years and i never checkedAutomated TradingHow do you decide when to intervene manually?Feature RequestsCompare two backtest runs side by side

9 replies

C
CoffeeAndCharts· Jul 2026 ago
I started doing the review I always said I'd do. Turns out I had time for it all along, I just filled the time with staring.
SlowSwing_Sam· Jul 2026 ago
This is the whole reason I trade the way I do. Glad it's not just me who found the quiet uncomfortable at first.
CryptoKarl· Jul 2026 ago
crypto never sleeps so the free time thing hit me different. i had to physically leave my desk because otherwise i'd start manually 'helping' the bot, which historically means adding leverage at the worst possible moment. walking the dog has saved me more money than any indicator.
D
DrawdownDave· Jul 2026 ago
My version of the free time was worse. I used it to build a second strategy while the first one was still unproven, then ran both, then couldn't tell which one was bleeding me. Doing nothing would have been a better use of those hours.
DataDrivenDee· Jul 2026 ago
Curious how you'd know the outside time is actually helping vs just feeling better. Did your intervention rate drop after you made the rule, or is it more that the sitting-there itch went away?
S
SpreadWatcher· Jul 2026 ago
Sitting in front of it costs money in my experience. Every time I watched a fill I decided I could have got a better one, and the chasing cost more than the spread I was annoyed about.
L
LurkerLee· Jul 2026 ago
Did the urge to watch fade, or did you just replace it with something? Mine came back whenever the position was bigger than usual.
ZenTrader_Ana· Jul 2026 ago
Lee that's the honest answer - it faded slowly, but only after I replaced it with something that had its own attention on it. And Dee, good question, I don't have a clean number. What I noticed first was that I stopped narrating the day to myself while it ran. The intervention count dropped after that, not before, which makes me think the itch was the cause rather than the symptom. Karl's 'manually helping' is exactly the phrase for it.
F
FiveMinFiona· Jul 2026 ago· edited Aug 2026 ago
The narration thing is a good tell, I use it too. If I'm talking myself through what the chart is doing, I'm already halfway to touching something. I log interventions with a reason field now. Most of the reasons read like nonsense a week later, which is its own kind of data.
Sign in to reply →
← All automated trading