Last Updated 07/07/26
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Seven posts in. A fully redesigned trading system. Real money on the line. Lessons learned the hard way.
If I could go back to day one and start building a trading bot over, here’s what I’d change.
I’d Start With More Stocks Immediately
My original watchlist was a small, hand-picked set of stocks. Names I knew. Companies I followed. It felt like a reasonable starting point.
It wasn’t. It was just my bias in disguise.
The bot couldn’t find good setups because the pool was too small. On any given day, maybe one or two of that short list had anything interesting happening. Most days, none of them did.
When I expanded to over a thousand stocks the difference was immediate. More candidates meant the bot could be selective instead of desperate. Better setups, better timing, better results.
If I started over I’d skip the hand-picked phase entirely and go straight to a broad universe from day one.
I’d Focus on Exits Before Entries
I spent most of my early energy on the buy logic. What signals to use, what thresholds to set, how to score candidates. The entry was the exciting part — the moment the bot finds something and pulls the trigger.
But exits are where you make or lose money.
A mediocre entry with a great exit strategy will outperform a perfect entry with sloppy exits every single time. The stop-loss system, the trailing stops, knowing when to take profit — that’s where the real edge is.
If I started over I’d build the exit system first and spend twice as long on it as the entry logic. The entry gets you into the trade. The exit determines whether you keep the money.
I’d Automate the Boring Stuff Earlier
For the first few weeks I was manually checking logs, manually reviewing positions, manually monitoring the server. It worked, but it didn’t scale.
Eventually I built automated reports, health checks, and monitoring tools. The bot emails me summaries. It flags problems before they become emergencies. The server restarts processes automatically if something crashes.
That infrastructure isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like progress when you’re building it. But it’s the difference between a bot that needs babysitting and one that actually runs on its own.
I’d build all of that from the start instead of bolting it on later.
I’d Use Smaller Position Sizes for Longer
I started with deliberately small positions, which was already conservative. But I was tempted to increase them as soon as things seemed to be working.
The right move was to stay small until the system proved itself across different market conditions. Up markets, down markets, choppy markets, quiet markets. Each one tests the system differently, and you want to find the problems with small money, not big money.
If I started over I’d commit to small positions for at least a month regardless of early results. The goal in the beginning isn’t to make money — it’s to find the bugs.
I’d Track Everything From Day One
Every trade, every signal, every scan. What the bot saw, what it did, what happened after.
I didn’t set up proper tracking early enough. When I went back to analyze early trades, some of the data was incomplete. I could see what the bot bought and sold, but I couldn’t always reconstruct why it made those decisions at that moment.
Now every scan logs the full picture — what scored, what qualified, what didn’t and why. That data is invaluable for understanding what’s actually working versus what you think is working.
If I started over, the very first thing I’d build — before the buy logic, before the sell logic, before anything — would be the logging system.
I’d Expect to Rebuild the Whole Thing
The bot I’m running today shares almost nothing with the one I started with. The entry logic is completely different. The exit system was redesigned from scratch. The scoring was overhauled. The watchlist expanded by orders of magnitude.
That felt frustrating at the time. Like I was admitting the original design was wrong.
It wasn’t wrong. It was a starting point. Every version taught me something that made the next version better. The first bot taught me what a trading bot needs to do. The second version taught me how signals actually behave. The current version is built on everything the previous ones got wrong.
If I started over I’d plan for that from the beginning. Don’t try to build the perfect system on the first attempt. Build something that works well enough to learn from, then rebuild based on what you learned.
I’d Stop Reading and Start Building a Trading Bot Sooner
Before I started this project I spent weeks reading about trading strategies, technical analysis, algorithm design, backtesting frameworks. I was trying to learn enough to build it right the first time.
Most of that reading didn’t help. Not because it was bad information — it’s because trading theory and trading practice are different things. You can read about RSI and moving averages for months, but you won’t really understand them until you see how they behave on live charts with real money.
The best way to learn how to build a trading bot is to build a trading bot. Start simple, start small, and let the market teach you what works.
The Honest Summary
If I started this project over today, I’d build it faster, track it better, focus on exits over entries, and plan to rebuild the whole thing at least once.
I’d also give myself permission to be wrong more often. Every mistake was a lesson. Every lesson made the system better. The path from the original bot to what’s running today wasn’t a straight line — it was a series of problems followed by fixes, each one getting closer to something that works.
That’s still the process. And I think it always will be.
If you take one thing from this, it is that building a trading bot is iterative — you learn by shipping, not by planning. When you are ready to start building a trading bot of your own, here is exactly how I set mine up from scratch.
Up Next
Performance numbers are coming. The system is generating real trades now and I’m building a data set that’s large enough to say something meaningful. When I share those numbers they’ll come with full context — not just what the bot returned, but why, and what it tells us about what’s working and what still needs to change.
If you haven’t already, sign up for Robinhood with my link and we’ll both get a free stock 🎁
Steve is the founder of Bot and Bull. He personally uses every tool reviewed on this site and only recommends what he genuinely believes in — no press releases, no paid placements.
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