Success Story: Charlie B. and AI
By Dave Mabe
I'm sure you've heard me preach about how great AI can be, yet most traders use it completely wrong. (I'll be doing a webinar with IBKR on this exact topic next month - stay tuned...)
So I loved getting this email from long-time list member Charlie B. about his use of AI in his strategy development (used with permission, edited for brevity):
Charlie B.:
I caught both of your interviews Tuesday: with Tim on SMB Capital’s Bionic Trader and later with Alex on B the Trader.
My biggest takeaway from your interview with Alex was that AI can accelerate the work, but refining a thesis still requires backtesting, exploration, and studying the actual trades.
Until Tuesday night, though, I hadn’t reviewed my individual trade charts after each Amibroker exploration. I was leaving it up to AI to figure things out, which was a big mistake.
So instead I had Claude help by organizing my Explore trades in each of four buckets:
Biggest winners
Biggest losers
Trades that started green but finished red
Smallest losers
After a few hours of manually reviewing charts, I was able to identify and begin correcting issues Claude and ChatGPT had missed.
I’m still in the early stages of my systematic trading journey and months away from even paper trading, but I continue to make steady progress.
To reinforce what I’m learning, I’m starting to create a series of short how-to YouTube videos to share with friends who are interested in learning.
Dave:
The biggest takeaway from Charlie's experience is this:
I was leaving it up to AI to figure things out, which was a big mistake.
If you're trying to "outsource" your strategy development to AI, you're putting a ceiling on your trading.
Worse yet, you probably don't realize it.
This is no different than joining a trading guru's room, following their stock picks, and expecting to be a great trader.
Trading is so much harder than simply figuring out the right prompt to ask ChatGPT or Claude.
Or joining a trading room.
Both of these things limit your trading.
Why?
It caps your path to confidence.
There's only so much size you'll be able to use with your strategy if you've "outsourced" the hard work of creating it.
Charlie took the opposite approach: he figured out how a process to have AI increase his path to confidence.
Nice work, Charlie, and thanks for sharing with the list!
-Dave
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