Trading is not an easy task and since it involves own's money, it's a risky activity.

Obviously, the level of risk depends on the amount of money invested but also on the type of strategy the trader is adopting.

This latter aspect is, undoubtedly, the most important and, at the same time, because of the plethora of variables that one has to take into consideration, is where many traders fail.

Systematic trading, as against discretionary trading, aims to handle all these variables thanks to precise rules given by the trader to the computer. It will be the latter to operate directly on the markets relieving the former of any decision.

Clearly, programming skills are required but then the advantages are many:

• possibility to test a strategy on historical data;
• possibility to optimize the parameters in order to maximize a variable, like the net profit;
• decisions are taken without any “emotion”, even during drawdown periods;
• operations on the markets are executed in automatic mode.

Nowadays, several programming languages are suitable for this purpose so that one can choose on the basis of own's preferences but it must also be taken into consideration what brokers offer.

The platform “MetaTrader” is the most popular and also free.