Extreme Ways Are Back Again

The return of the Botfarm

Indulge me while I nerd out for a spell. The original Botfarm (RIP 2009) was the place where I tried a dozen different ways to make money on autopilot, with minimal success (and coming to a sticky end).

This time round, of course, it will all be different!

Time hangs heavy during lockdown, now that I have rolled off the major contract that kept me busy for the past few months.

Which gives me the perfect opportunity to dust off a few old obsessions and see whether they still have the ability to get my juices flowing.

Music is an obvious candidate. I have always wanted to record my back-catalogue of songs and maybe post them here on Medium. The lyrics are already uploaded, but it must be better to hear how they are meant to sound.

The Tascam Portastudio is set up and I just need to master its many buttons and sliders before I can get going with my own limited echo of Michelle Monet’s 2020 project.

But pushing that to the back burner, I just received a decent spec desktop PC, no longer needed for my wife’s business, which I can leave running for 24 hours a day. This means that I can have another push towards that glittering but elusive goal of making money while you sleep.

First candidates were crypto coins that can be mined on a PC (unlike Bitcoin, which needs expensive specialised equipment). So, Vertcoin is currently hammering my Graphics Processing Unit, while Monero is trickling away on my CPU. These are akin to a lottery ticket, as the opportunity for actually gaining a reward as a solo miner with consumer kit is remote.

But remote chances never stopped me from buying a real lottery ticket, so away they go.

Next up, a relic from the old days, my favourite poker bot. It’s a joy to watch playing, and is undoubtedly far more of a shark than I am when playing manually. But the big bucks are constantly elusive with this program, so that too is more of a hostage to fortune than a copper-bottomed moneyspinner.

I still have my lifetime subscription to the greyhound and horseracing bot, but since all meetings in the UK have been cancelled for the moment, I can take my time about setting that up again.

Roulette bots seem to have died out in the ten years since I last played with them. Perhaps their purchasers finally figured out that there’s no strategy or tool that can beat the random number generator and the house’s inbuilt edge. I would welcome the chance to prove the same to myself again, but am still waiting for responses from the few vendors I contacted.

Expert advisors (EAs) are still going strong. These are the scripts which can be set running on forex and other trading platforms, which automate your trading strategy. I have been contacted by a few vendors over the years with free updates to the EAs I purchased a decade ago. This shows admirable customer service, and makes me think that perhaps that wheel is worth another spin too.

But in the trading arena, more glittering toys are now available. I have been looking at a system which is free to IG Index customers called ProRealTime. This lets you press a few buttons and construct a trading system based on any of the hundreds of instruments that IG offer. Crucially, you can also backtest the system you just devised to see how it would have fared in real life under different market conditions. With hundreds of instruments, dozens of indicators and many other parameters to tweak, there are literally thousands of different systems you could construct in a matter of minutes. It’s this software, more than any of the others, that I see providing endless hours of tinkering and testing, without having to risk a penny.

And that’s the crucial difference between this time round and the glory days of the old Botfarm.

I’m not going to risk significant scratch until I have a reasonable prospect of success. And, unlike the Botfarm blog, I’m not going to be publicising every positive outcome, as I really don’t want the responsibility of enthusing others to follow in my footsteps.

I can cope with my own vices, but not with leading others into temptation.

Many thanks for reading!

My financial follies are legion, but here’s a small selection.

#500Race