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Ah, the dream of turning your e-mini trading into a slick money making machine through automation. It’s what every e-mini trader craves. Imagine sitting back, sipping a cold one, and watching as your computer makes winning trade after winning trade, piling up cash in your futures trading account. Sounds like paradise, right?

And those purveyors of automated trading systems, boasting fantastic return figures, only fuel our desire to rid ourselves of the manual labor of entering orders and setting stops. But let’s face facts: trading robots are nothing new. Investment Banks have been using them for decades, and over 60% of the contracts traded on the ES contract are computer-initiated. Clearly, they’re on to something.

But here’s the thing: Investment Banks use their bots for High-Frequency Trading (HFT). They have the cash to overwhelm the market for 22 seconds – and win big. It takes megabucks to run HFT, and unless you’re a fat cat, you’ll have to fall back on the retail trading bots available to you. And let me tell you, the available selection is more than a little dodgy.

I’ve looked at a few of these clunky programs and run them on a demo account for a bit. Suffice it to say, the results were less than impressive. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was still let down. Common sense dictates that an item costing between $500 to $1000 is unlikely to generate millions. If they could automate e-mini trading, they’d be worth much more than that, even to the most gullible trader.

So where does this leave you, my fellow trader? In my opinion, bots are a waste of time. None of the models I tried made a profit, let alone a killing. So much for sipping that cold one on the beach while your e-mini trading robot rakes in the cash.

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Ihab Salloum