Do I need to be good at manual trading?

In my opinion, while you don’t need to be the expert at manual trading to be able to write a good strategy, you need to at least have knowledge of how real trading works, and the best way to learn it is by doing manual trading. You don’t need to even make any profit, but you need to know and understand terms that are commonly used, what are they for, how they works, etc.

Some of common “issue” that freaks new FT users who never trade before are

• When their limit order got canceled due to timeout. “What happened? What didi I do wrong? I’m using stock strategy. I don’t change anything. How to fix this?”.
• When they are using market order and got hit by big slippage
• When they want to trade non-existant pair(s) “I want to trade BTC/DOGE. I have put it in the whitelist. Why the bot says the whitelist is empty?”
• When they have plenty of dusts at their spot wallet
• and others

You will know almost all of these things if you have traded manually before. It will help you to focus more on the strategy and not get distracted by these “issues”. You can start trading on spot market. The minimum trade amount there should be low enough, for example on Kucoin you can trade for 5 USDT, so the risk of loss isn’t too big. Consider it as lesson fee.

Another thing I want to add is that if you think you have a good manual strategy, don’t have big expectation that it would be profitable when you converted it to FT strategy. Every users that said so in the past, have failed to even get close to the good result of manual trading that they claimed to be. Why? Most of them forget one important “indicator”, which is human intuition. Despite they thinking that their strategy only use market data, in the end, their intuition would be the last defining indicator whether they want to enter/exit a trade or not. Sadly for now, you can’t put human intuition into code yet. I’m not saying you shouldn’t convert your strategy, but just have reasonable expectation, because what you see and what the bot see are very different.