Trading by hand vs a TradeCorgi agent: which suits you?

The short version

An agent is your own rules, followed without tiredness or second thoughts. Trading by hand keeps every decision with you. Many people do both: an agent for the repeatable rule, their own judgement for the rest.

What trading by hand gives you

• Full control. Every decision is yours, in the moment, with whatever information you have.
• Flexibility. You can act on things that are hard to write as rules, such as news or a change of plan.
• No extra cost. You pay only the exchange's trading fees.

What it costs you

• Attention. Crypto trades around the clock. A rule you meant to follow at 3 a.m. does not get followed.
• Consistency. People skip trades after losses, chase after gains, and move stop-losses "just this once".
• Records. Few people write down why they made each trade, so it is hard to learn which decisions worked.
• Testing. Most hand-traded strategies are never tested on past prices with fees.

What an agent gives you

• Your rules, every time, at any hour, the moment they are met.
• Limits enforced before every order: budget, stop-loss, daily loss limit and open positions.
• A written reason for each trade and each time the agent stayed out.
• Testing first: a backtest with fees, then paper trading on live prices.

What it costs you

• A subscription for alerts or for an agent that trades; see pricing. Paper trading is free.
• Clear rules. An agent does exactly what its rules say, so you write them precisely. You can pause or change them at any time.
• Setup. You need to write your rules clearly and connect a trade-only exchange key.

A worked example: the same rule, two ways

Your rule: buy $50 of BTC when it falls 5% in a day, sell at 4% above, stop at 6% below.

By hand, BTC falls 5.3% overnight while you sleep. You see it at breakfast after a partial recovery and decide the moment has passed. Two weeks later, after a different dip, you buy, the price keeps falling, and you hold past your 6% stop hoping it comes back.

With an agent, it buys within a minute of the 5% fall, logs the reason, sells at the 4% target, and on the later dip sells at the 6% stop and pauses for the day if the daily loss limit is reached. It did not do anything clever. It did what you had decided in advance. This is an illustrative example, not a real result.

A middle path

Copilot sits between the two. Your rule watches the market and sends an alert with the reason and a link to your exchange; you decide and place the trade. You keep every decision, but the watching is done for you, and every rule is still backtested with fees first.

Questions to ask yourself

• Can you write your strategy as rules? "Buy $50 of BTC when it falls 5% in a day" can be automated. "Buy when it feels oversold" cannot, until you say what oversold means.
• How often do you miss your own rules? If you regularly skip trades, buy late or move stops, an agent closes that gap.
• How often do you trade? A few trades a month rarely justify a subscription; a rule that should act several times a week, at any hour, often does.
• Have you tested your rules? Trading by hand rarely includes a backtest with fees. Describing your rules to an agent gives you one, even if you keep trading by hand.
• Would you rather keep the final click? Then alerts may suit you better than an agent that trades.

Which suits you

• Trade by hand for occasional trades you would rather decide in the moment.
• Use alerts if you have clear rules but want to place every order yourself.
• Use an agent if you have rules you want followed exactly, around the clock, with limits that cannot be skipped.