u/ineedtopooargh ·
Reddit — r/algotrading
· April 27, 2026 at 06:16
· ⬆ 16 pts
· 💬 24 comments
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AI Summary
Summary
The author is documenting a high-risk personal trading experiment, attempting to turn £1,000 into £1 million over 3-5 years using a fully automated day-trading bot.
The strategy involves aggressive position sizing (5% risk, 10% reward per trade) and exclusively day trades the US100 (Nasdaq) and UK100 (FTSE).
Quality assessment: This is speculation and noise. It is a personal trading journal/experiment rather than well-researched due diligence or an actionable market thesis.
Score16
Comments24
Upvote %68%
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Hi all, I created a 100% automated bot back last summer, and it has returned 140% paper-trading since then. This week I bit the bullet and it began trading on real money, £1000.
I have programmed in automatic bet size increases for compounding, so there is nothing i need to do manually at this point. In fact, I am only aware of a trade when it closes and being sent a notification.
The bets it takes are pretty huge. Risk is usually 5% and reward around 10%. It days trades us100 and uk100 exclusively.
If (when) drawdown hits 50% of previous highest account value, it will cut the bet size in half and continue.
This is a bit of fun. I always hear how you need to be conservative with your bet sizes and risk max 2%, so we will see how this pans out.
It takes around 200 trades per year, so i am expecting an account halving once per year. If the performance of my paper trading account continues, I can expect around 250% per year (that 140% should be nearer 200 due to some technical issues which have been resolved), which when compounded is 10x.
So when starting with £1k, it would take 3 years to reach a million. Let's have a couple of years added in for leeway so we will make it 5 years in total.
I believe this is a fantasy many traders have when they start out, that within a few years if they can just compound their gains they can get super rich. Well, now I am doing that experiment with real money, mostly for some fun and entertainment purposes, so please don't shit on me.
I'll post here at the end of the week if anything interesting has happened during the week.
EDIT: just to clarify, the first image is live forward-testing results from the last 8 months. The second image is my live real-money account linked to this bot, which I opened a couple of days ago.