Autotrading account  [SOLVED]

Good morning,

I've been working on developing and backtesting some signals in a portfolio. I'm looking to set up autotrading now with some small $$$ to test out the process and connection.

My question is do I need to have a dedicated account to autotrade? For example, if I have a $100k brokerage account on IB, can I autotrade $50k and discretionary trade $50k in the same account? Or would I have to break the account into two separate accounts? My guess is that as long as I keep cash available for the autotrading orders then it will work as is...

Thank you,

Shawn

I would highly suggest all Testing on an automated account be done with IBs paper trading account. It's free and great for testing-debugging.
You can auto trade or manually trade with the same account but you should always monitor auto trading, in case of unexpected trades.

I believe that you can carry out automatic and manual trading in the same account but (in addition to having sufficient balance), you have to take into account that in the same asset, you either operate with automatic systems or you operate manually, but not operate with an automatic system and manually. in the same product since the operations are not independent, and will interfere with each other.
That is, you can apply an automatic system on a chart of one asset and have another chart of a different product where you operate manually. But do not operate automatically and manually on the same product. (you could only do this without interfering operations if you have two accounts)
You must take this into account so that manual trading does not interfere with operations opened by automatic trading.
Of course, you must have sufficient balance for the requirements of the operations you carry out.
On the other hand, I totally agree with sptrader, when he advises using the simulated account before applying any automatic system in real.
regards

As sptrader said it is very useful to test your strategies in a paper account before running it live in production.

Btw, i was wondering, can you run both a live and paper account simultaneously with IB?

Because when you already have strategies in production, how could you test new strategies in a paper account in the same time?

Many thanks in advance.

Thank you for the advice. I'll set up and try a paper trading acct on IB this weekend.

Tibouss... Im pretty sure you can run both demo/real accounts at the same time... You would use 2 charts of the same equity... One chart you go into signal properties/auto trading and at the bottom select "paper trader" or whatever demo account you have.. On the other chart you would go to the signal properties/auto trading and at the bottom select "cqg"(or whatever our live account is listed as)..

Thank you BB123, i was confused between data source and broker profile.
I create a new broker profile for the paper account.