Articles
Three short, practical reads for South Africans using or considering an automated trading platform. They are written from what our support team and personal managers observe in real accounts, and none of them pretends trading is easier than it is.
Common trading mistakes, and the habits that prevent them
Most avoidable losses we see do not come from exotic events. They come from a handful of ordinary mistakes, repeated in different accounts, usually in the first three months. The first is depositing more than one can calmly afford to lose: the moment a position matters too much, every dip feels like an emergency, and emergency decisions are bad decisions. Fix the amount before you start, in writing, and treat it as the ceiling rather than the target.
The second is changing settings mid-move. A strategy paused in a drawdown and swapped for the previous month's best performer transfers yesterday's problem to tomorrow's account; the pattern is so common it has a name, churning, and its main product is fees. The cure is a review rhythm: look weekly, decide monthly, and write down why before changing anything. The third mistake is ignoring fees until the first monthly report: fees are disclosed before every transaction and summarised per month, and knowing them in advance changes which strategies make sense at your position sizes.
The fourth is treating a good month as a new baseline. A strong stretch tempts a bigger deposit at exactly the moment confidence is least calibrated, usually right before the market reminds everyone what a normal month can look like. Size up slowly, in steps, with the same loss-level discipline you applied at the start. The fifth, specific to automated platforms, is set-and-forget: automation removes the workload of watching markets, not the responsibility for decisions, and the users who do best are the ones who read their summaries and know what their strategies are doing.
Manual trading versus automated trading
Manual trading means you find the opportunities, place the orders and manage the positions yourself. Its strengths are real: you learn how markets actually behave, every decision carries a lesson, and nothing executes without your conscious choice. Its costs are equally real: markets trade while you sleep and work, watching them well takes hours most people do not have, and fatigue, hope and impatience sit directly on the trigger.
Automated trading moves the execution to rules. The system watches continuously, applies your parameters consistently, never gets bored at 02:00 and never revenge-trades a loss. That consistency is the genuine edge: a rule followed every time, at every hour, in rand amounts you chose in advance. What automation cannot do is invent good rules or make bad ones safe; it executes the parameters it is given, including the ones that were a bad idea on the day they were set. Automated does not mean safer, and it certainly does not mean profitable by default.
The honest comparison is about fit. Someone with time, appetite for learning markets and tolerance for screen hours can do well manually, at least while the hours are available. Someone trading rand they cannot watch all day, or whose discipline collapses under pressure, gets more from automation's consistency plus a human manager's judgement. Many of our users run hybrids: automated strategies for the core, a small manual allocation for learning. Whichever you choose, the decision framework in our Risk Disclosure applies to both equally.
Trader psychology: the machinery behind your own decisions
Trading psychology is not a soft topic; it is the study of how normal human reactions produce expensive market behaviour. Loss aversion makes a losing position feel twice as heavy as an equal gain feels good, which is why people cut winners early and nurse losers long past sense. Recency bias makes the last three days feel like the new permanent reality, so a green week invites over-sizing and a red one invites panic, both at the wrong moments. FOMO, the fear of missing out, converts other people's screenshots into your unresearched entries.
Automation helps with psychology precisely because it removes the moment of temptation: rules set on a calm Tuesday are not vulnerable to a frantic Thursday. But the psychology does not disappear, it moves. Now the dangerous moments are the quiet ones: the itch to intervene in a working strategy, the urge to pause at the worst point of a normal drawdown, the temptation to raise risk after a winning week because it "feels" free. The defenses are boring and effective: written rules for when you will review and what counts as a reason to change; limits set in advance and changed slowly; a personal manager whose job includes saying "this change you want at 22:40 can wait for morning".
One habit above all protects the psychological machinery: keeping a decision journal. A line per decision, what you did, why, and how you felt. Patterns surface within weeks, both the profitable ones and the expensive ones, and self-knowledge compounds faster than any strategy. Our reporting gives you the numbers; the journal gives you the reasons; together they turn experience, good and bad, into something usable.
A closing thought that ties the three reads together: mistakes, automation and psychology are one subject wearing three hats. The mistakes are what psychology does to unmanaged trading; automation is the guard rail that gives your better judgement the last word; and the journal is how you check, over time, whether the arrangement is actually working.
Start small, write things down, and let the record argue with your impulses.
Ready for the practical side? The Getting Started guide covers setup, and the FAQ answers what new users ask first.