Adrian Reid warns traders that outsourcing to AI without understanding the technical infrastructure is dangerous. If you can't quickly recreate your entire setup from scratch, you don't actually know how it works. Document everything, test on different machines, and make sure you can reset the system with minimal friction.
If you outsource your trading to AI, there's a huge risk that you're taking on, and it's not what you expect. Obviously, the AI models can go wrong, but there's something else which you need to understand. We have to understand exactly what we're doing and exactly why we're doing it in every aspect of our trading, because if we don't have an understanding of the detail, when a bug happens or when something goes wrong, it's very hard to fix it. And these bugs do happen. And unless we understand the detail, it's almost impossible to fix them in time. And this is where I think a lot of people are gonna come unstuck in the AI trading age, where people just, yeah, Claude, make me a trading bot. Yeah, implement it. Here's my API keys. Good. Make me rich. It might work for a period, although I doubt it. But even if it does work, as soon as something goes wrong and you've completely abdicated all of the understanding, it's very hard to resolve an issue. Even something like understanding how the database is structured, understanding what that connection is, where the data is sitting, how the data is updated, when it's updated, and how it feeds through and all that. If you're using MetaStock data, okay, how's that MetaStock data database structured? How does that update? What can go wrong with it? If your computer goes down now, a really good measure of how well you understand your setup is how quickly could you recreate it and make it, get it working again. I'm not saying I want to do that, but it would be the worst thing in the world, and it would be, it would be days of pain, and I'd probably have to take time off work, call in sick, and that's the way you're feeling about it, you probably don't understand the detail enough of exactly how everything fits together and how it's all working. Then that probably shows that you're okay. Now, obviously, there's a spectrum. When you start out getting the whole— all the tech set up is challenging. But as you go through the process a few times and you install it on a few different computers and you get to understand the intricacies of what's actually going on, this gets much, much easier. But if you've been doing this 3 or 4 years and the prospect of setting things up again terrifies you, and it's, oh my God, I don't know how to do this, I'm not really sure how these things fit together, that would be a really good trigger to write down the points that you're not sure of and then come get help so that we can stabilize your platform, make it robust in case something changes, something gets affected, and you can then allow you to re— reset up much more easily.
