4 Months Using a Free Trading Bot: Profit, Drawdown, and What I Learned in Practice
Four months using a free trading bot, and it is time to show everything: profits, losses, drawdown, and the most important conclusions I reached from this experience.
The first question most people ask is obvious: if the bot is free, is it actually any good? And the second comes right after: if I already know how to trade manually and have almost a decade of market experience, why would I put money into an automation?
The short answer is simple. Because a bot does not exist to completely replace manual trading. It can work as a form of diversification. Instead of leaving 100% of your capital dependent only on your performance in front of the screen, you can test part of your capital in an automated strategy and observe how it behaves over time.
And that is exactly what I did.
How the Trading Bot Test Started
This experiment did not begin now. It all started when I tested the bot with a small amount, around R$3,000, just to see whether the automation actually made sense. Later, I increased the amount and made new videos showing the results, including when the account started trading with more capital.
Throughout these months, I committed to one thing: showing everything. Not only the good periods, but also the bad ones. And that is exactly what makes this kind of follow-up interesting. Anyone can show profit. What separates a serious analysis from disguised promotion is the willingness to also show the negative moments.
And yes, the bot had losses. It went through a strong drawdown. But it also recovered. So the correct analysis is not to look at a single week or a single month. It is to observe the complete behavior of the strategy.
What the Bot’s Performance Shows
The bot’s history began in May 2025. At one point, the automation had delivered around 130% return in seven months. That is an extremely expressive number. After that came a heavy drawdown, and the return fell to around 70%.
That was exactly when many people lost confidence, turned the bot off, and abandoned the strategy.
But that kind of decision usually happens at the worst possible moment. Because after that drawdown, the bot started performing well again and recovered a good portion of the lost ground, climbing back toward roughly 90% cumulative return.
That is one of the biggest lessons in the market, whether with bots or manual trading: many people can handle the good phase, but they quit exactly when the strategy is under the most pressure, without giving the process time to recover.
The Drawdown Was Real and It Was Significant
There is no point in sugarcoating it. The drawdown was strong.
There was a period in which the bot gave back a relevant part of the accumulated profit. There was a negative month. There was a bad stretch. There was a losing streak. And this needs to be said clearly.
Many people look only at the cumulative percentage and forget that, along the way, the performance curve goes through very uncomfortable moments. That is where those who understand what they are doing get separated from those who only want to be in the market while everything looks easy.
December was a clear example of that. It was a bad month. The bot suffered. And that was exactly when many people turned the automation off. But shortly after that, performance improved again.
This behavior is very similar to what happens in the market in general. People hold on to a strategy during the good phase, but when the drawdown arrives, they abandon everything near the bottom of the curve.
The Big Difference Between the Bot’s Return and Your Account’s Return
This is something many people do not understand.
There is the return of the master account, meaning the base account of the strategy, and there is the individual return of each person using the bot. Those two things are not the same.
Why? Because each user makes their own decisions along the way. Some people increase position size when they are winning. Some reduce size during drawdown. Some withdraw part of the money. Some turn the bot off at the worst moment. Some join only after the decline and catch only the recovery.
All of that changes the final result completely.
In my case, for example, there was a point when I was already trading with a larger lot size. So when the drawdown came, I took the hit with the bigger size. That directly affects the performance of the personal account. In other words, the bot’s chart is an important reference, but it does not automatically represent everyone’s result in the same way.
The Good Months Were Very Good
Even with the drawdown, the strategy’s history shows some very strong months.
There were months of 4%, 4.6%, 16%, and even 36%. That is extremely aggressive performance. And precisely because of that, it does not come in a straight line. Strategies like this almost always go through difficult periods, because extraordinary returns usually come with greater volatility in the equity curve.
That is where many people get confused. They want a bot that delivers strong profits, but without any discomfort along the way. That practically does not exist. If the bot is aggressive enough to deliver very strong months, it can also go through rougher phases.
January and February 2026: The Bot Started Responding Again
After the rough period, 2026 began with an important recovery.
January was basically flat, slightly negative. February started delivering around 4.5%. And in a single week, the bot reached nearly 5%.
That does not mean the problem is over or that from now on there will only be profits ahead. It simply means that after a heavy drawdown, the strategy started responding again. And that reinforces the idea that turning off a bot or abandoning a strategy right after a bad phase may be exactly the mistake that prevents you from participating in the recovery.
What I Learned From Using a Trading Bot for Four Months
The main conclusion is that a bot can make sense as part of a broader allocation strategy, not as a magic solution.
I do not see automation as a total substitute for manual trading. I see it as a way to diversify. If I can leave a small part of my capital being managed by an automated strategy while I continue trading manually with the rest, that already creates an interesting dynamic.
Another important conclusion is that the biggest enemy of the user is often not the bot. It is the behavior of the person using it. People change lot size, turn it off during drawdown, withdraw at the wrong time, interfere too much in the middle of the process, and destroy the result.
In some cases, the best thing a person can do is get out of the way of the automation and let the system logic work over the horizon it was designed for.
Is It Worth Using a Trading Bot?
In my case, yes, I will keep using it.
Not because the bot is perfect. It is not. It had drawdown. It had a negative month. It went through pressure. But in the bigger picture, it has shown a track record where cumulative profit is still greater than cumulative loss.
The logic here is simple: if the strategy has proven over time that it has positive expectancy, then a drawdown is not automatically a reason to quit. It is part of the game.
This is not investment advice. Each person needs to understand their own risk profile, the size of the capital they want to use, and their comfort level with this kind of fluctuation. But looking at my practical experience, the conclusion was positive.
Does the Bot Work for Passive Income?
It can serve as an attempt at passive income, as long as the person clearly understands what they are doing.
The bot sends orders on its own, without requiring you to spend the whole day trading in front of the screen. In that sense, there is indeed an automation logic that comes close to the idea of operational passive income. But that does not mean absence of risk. Quite the opposite.
You need to accept that there will be bad periods, negative months, and drawdowns. If the person cannot handle that phase, they will probably sabotage their own result by interfering with the strategy at the worst possible moment.
The Biggest Mistake of People Who Use Trading Bots
The biggest mistake is treating automation as if it were a constant profit machine.
There is no strategy without rough patches. There is no curve that only goes up. And when the user enters automation without understanding that, they make exactly the wrong decision when discomfort arrives.
They turn it on after it has already gone up too much. They increase lot size when they become too confident. They turn it off during drawdown. And then they watch the strategy recover without them.
This behavior is very common, and deep down it is not very different from the investor who buys the top and sells the bottom in traditional markets.
Transparency Matters More Than Promises
If there is one thing this entire follow-up proves, it is that transparency matters.
Did the bot make money? Yes. Did the bot also lose money? Yes. Did the curve suffer? Yes. And that is exactly why following the full process makes much more sense than believing isolated screenshots of gains or promises of easy returns.
A serious market is not about hiding drawdown. It is about understanding whether the strategy still makes sense even after going through one.
Conclusion
After four months using a free trading bot, the conclusion I reached is that automation can make sense, as long as it is approached in the right way.
Not as a miracle, not as blind recommendation, and not as a promise of profit without pain. But as a strategy with a track record, positive expectancy, and pressure phases that need to be endured rationally.
The bot went through a rough period, gave back part of its profits, made many people lose confidence, and after that began to recover. That behavior alone already teaches more about the market than many beautiful internet promises ever will.
In my case, I remain confident in the strategy and will continue using it. Not because it is perfect, but because so far it has shown something much more important: in the long run, there is still more profit than loss.
-> Check out the video:
3 Responses