As helpful a suite of tools like Trade-Ideas is to have on the payroll; generating ideas based on pattern recognition, backtesting those ideas based on the recent market activity, and in some cases automating the next trade, there’s another important ‘player’ to employ on your staff: the cleaner or bookkeeper.

StockTickr is an online portfolio tracker that automatically captures the data of each trade essential for any manual journal and allows a trader to make more informed conclusions about a trader’s performance over time.  The value of having someone clean up and make sense of your trades – priceless.

The Oz behind StockTickr, Dave Mabe, uses his tool combined with Trade-Ideas’ Automated Trading Bot so well, he’s changed his trading style and lived to write about it.

Here’s the latest in a series of posts about his journey.  This article discusses how backtesting (and its assumptions and abstractions from the real thing) plays a crucial role in grading a trading system.

• One Trader’s Transition to Automated Trading: Insights for You
• StockTickr Interview Reveals How We Use Automated Trading