Trade Ideas Holly Automated Trading with IB

[sawtooth500 33]

So as of late trade ideas has been pushing their automated trading with their AI, Holly. I'm skeptical to spend the money to buy in to that as in my past dabbles with Holly she does great on paper but not so much in real life. 

Has anyone here tried the automatic trading with Holly?

I sent TI an email expressing my concerns to them, and to say the least their response was not very reassuring....

What I wrote to them:

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Hello,

I currently have a TI basic subscription. I’m intrigued about the automatic trading with Holly and IB, but I have some concerns. I’ve used Holly in the past. 

1. On paper Holly makes good, consistent returns. However, do you have return statistics with Holly restricted to shorting only stocks that IB has available for short? In my experience in the past, Holly has gone short in a lot of positions that I cannot short and that would make the actual results very different from Holly’s paper returns. 

2. In the past Holly has entered a lot of stocks with poor liquidity. Is this still the case? I am concerned that if I set Holly to autotrade, I’m sure that a bunch of other people are autotrading too. If I can’t get the fill at the price that Holly enters at, my actual results will be very different than Holly’s paper results. 

3. For stops, does Holly send stop market or stop limit orders to IB? I’m concerned with both and Holly - if hundreds of users get stopped out at once, then that would cause a price spike in the actual market and my actual losses with Holly would be far worse than what’s on paper. 

If you could please let me know about the above 3 concerns, I would appreciate it.

And here is their reply:

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Hello

Let me get to these in order

1. What you can and cannot short is different for every client and their relationship with the broker so we do not track this. It's important to note here that we do not intend this to be a blackbox system but a new way to trade so we do not track our client's results as they are all different. 

2. See not about blockbox system above

3. Holly uses stop market orders.

Thanks
 

Thoughts?

[JasonH 47]

Thanks for sharing this. The concept of using AI and machine learning to obtain an edge is also very interesting to me. Based on the marketing material on their website, it sounds like they are using some kind of machine learning algo to model the market over a period of 60 days to help determine what happens tomorrow. But I haven't found any specifics yet. Reddit (link to post) and BBT forums was first place I went after reading about it on their website. If I come across anything else interesting about it I'll reply again here.

[sawtooth500 33]

So TI is sending out marketing emails offering the Holly test drive next week for about $9 I think... in their marketing emails they are mentioning that you will also have the option to try autotrading with Holly.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to test it and see how valid my above concerns were, but unfortunately after signing up I was told by the TI support team that autotrading is NOT included in the test drive contrary to what their marketing emails say... so if anyone else was thinking about trying this you won't get the auto trading feature in the test drive.