QUESTION

How many trades a day should a trading bot take?

SHORT ANSWER

There is no correct number, but frequency and selectivity trade off directly against each other. A selective gold system may average ten trades a month; a system taking several trades a day on the same instrument has almost certainly loosened its filters to get there.

Trade count is an output of the strategy, not a target. Every filter that improves expectancy also reduces frequency, so a system that trades constantly is either exploiting something genuinely high-frequency or has removed the checks that were protecting it.

High frequency is not automatically wrong — it is a different business with different requirements. It needs very low costs per trade, because spread and commission are paid on every one, and it needs execution quality that retail routing often cannot supply. On gold, where the spread is wide relative to short targets, the arithmetic is unforgiving.

The practical risk in low frequency is psychological rather than mathematical. A system averaging ten trades a month goes quiet for days at a time, and the temptation to loosen settings during those gaps is exactly how a tested system becomes an untested one. See EA not taking trades.

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