343: How He Automated His Way to 3,500 Trades a Year w/ Dave Mabe
Summary
Dave Mabe, a systematic trader and former CTO of Trade Ideas, discusses his journey from discretionary day trading to fully automated strategies. He shares how backtesting revealed his manual discretion was inferior to simple rules, leading him to automate and scale from 350 to 3,500 trades annually. Mabe details his efficient backtesting method using custom data columns to filter trades, rather than iterative guesswork, and explains how AI tools now democratize strategy development. The episode also covers essential software, brokers, and the importance of uncorrelated strategies for manag…
Topics discussed
Intro: Backtesting beats discretionary trading
Dave Mabe's background and early trading
Moving from swing trading to day trading
First discretionary day trade results
Sponsor: Black Bull Markets and TradingView
Explaining the gapping stocks strategy
Trading part-time and the advantage of focus
Connection with SMB Capital and Bella
Coaching: Turning discretionary into systematic
Sponsor: TraderNin app for trading psychology
The difficulty of discretionary trading skills
Journaling discretion and the decision to backtest
The humbling result of the first backtest
Drawdowns and the need for new strategies
The correct backtesting process: one big test
Scaling wide: Equities vs Forex trade frequency
Automation: Scaling from 350 to 3500 trades
How to scale up: Smaller timeframes and rules
Software, brokers, and API recommendations
Costs and setup for automated trading
Using AI for backtesting and code generation
Outro: Free course and show notes
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