are there actually any good automated systems?
I don't know of any you can buy, but I trade a few self developed ones that return well. It is
extremely difficult to develop a system that never has a monthly drawdown, and it usually requires a ridiculously tight stop to do so. My best systems have small losing months and large winning months, the usual concept of let your winners run employed over an annual time frame. Market changes often happen suddenly (unfortunately - if it truly slowly phased I'd be a billionaire), there is no point in optimising a system week by week and letting it run, you need to optimise over 5 years and aim for an average monthly return. There are ultimately limits to the 'shapes' the market can take, so it isn't entirely random. Big bars in a ranging market are about the worst thing that can happen to a 24 hour auto trader, it is the handling of these moments that are the make or break (i.e. give up on the idea of short term moving averages and beware August). Until you start getting near zero commission and the tightest of spreads, anything else but monthly averages, rather than daily returns are usually terribly flawed. You will also see that with a theoretically unlimited account, stop losses generally worsen your bottom line, but they do reduce point to point drawdown and account size required to trade, so you need to find optimal return vs max drawdown, yet another consideration for your personal circumstance. Take profits are a different animal, generally they would improve your annual return, but require kabillions of permutations to be tested per instrument you trade, it is not child's play. I have two very high end computers crunching numbers nearly every weekend. A take profit of 80 on the EURUSD for example improves my annual return by some 20% rather than letting a reversal stop fill the open position at the new entry.
In the same way that you cannot find sufficient information on the web to properly complete a difficult tax return and set of accounts or carry on your own effective law practice (for example!), you cannot find sufficient information to completely develop a good automatic trader. The web is good for dispelling the need for general knowledge merchants (encyclopaedic style), but remains second rate when it comes to open sharing of very specialist knowledge, as you'd expect where profit is concerned. You have to either gather experience at institutional quant level or invest a lot of time and effort yourself into trial and error. I know of no other way and have had to do one or the other with every money making profession I have ever done.
I can SORT of understand why someone might share a winning system, when I first had mine, I only had 20 grand to trade it with. In two years I would have enough to trade at the level I wanted, but that seemed like a bloody long time to wait back then. However, it went against the grain to actually go ahead and publicise it and to this day I only share general tips on the likes of Big Mikes etc. I would say it is no coincidence that people you help with some of the nuts and bolts usually disappear altogether shortly after - I assume either having found their own system or failed and given in. Former or latter, they don't come back to share their own code!
