TradeAutomated

Prop-firm futures accounts demand constant attention. Setups appear on the 1-minute chart, get invalidated in seconds, and the trader has to be glued to the screen to catch them. I wanted a system that could watch the market for me, run strategies I’d designed, and place trades the instant the conditions hit. I also wanted to hand the same thing to a few friends without forcing them to install Python or touch a terminal.

TradeAutomated is a single .exe installer that friends double-click and run like any other Windows app. Under the hood it spins up a local FastAPI server and a React dashboard that lives in their browser. They log into TopStep once, pick a strategy, tune risk parameters, hit Start, and the bot takes over. There’s no cloud, no server fees, no shared state. Everything runs on their machine, their credentials stay encrypted on their disk, and their trades hit TopStep directly.

The whole system is three pieces running on the user’s own machine, talking over localhost.

Example

Example

Packaged with PyInstaller and wrapped in an Inno Setup installer, so what ships to a friend is a ~60 MB TradeAutomated-Setup-v1.1.3.exe that installs cleanly, runs offline, and upgrades in place without losing their trade history or encrypted credentials.

Each strategy lives as a self-contained detector module. The main loop calls the active detector once per bar and gets back a structured signal (direction, trigger price, SL / TP in ticks) or nothing. Swapping strategies is a one-line change on the dashboard.

The hardest part wasn’t the trading logic. It was making the whole thing invisible. No Python install. No terminal. No config files. A friend double-clicks the installer, clicks through SmartScreen, and ends up with a tray icon and a browser tab open to their dashboard. First launch pops a credential modal, they paste their TopStep API key, and the bot polling loop picks it up without a restart.

Upgrades are a re-run of the installer over the top. Their encrypted credentials and trade history live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\TradeAutomated\ and survive every rebuild. Multi-user on a shared PC just works: each Windows account has its own isolated data directory.

Running live on real TopStep accounts (mine plus a handful of friends’) with the full distribution pipeline as a 30-second turnaround: version bump, PyInstaller build, Inno Setup, uploaded installer. Concrete performance numbers will land on this page as the live run accumulates enough trades to be meaningful. Until then the interesting story is the system itself, not the P&L.