Ask a client what their AI Trader does and they will often point at the screen instead of explaining. That is the right answer. In eTrader AI the flow on the canvas is the whole AI Trader: if a step is not drawn there, it does not happen. Anyone who can read the blocks can tell what the AI Trader will do, including a firm owner who has never written a line of code.
Five Kinds of Block
The block palette is grouped by job. Most flows use at least one block from each group, connected in the order they should run.
Trigger blocks decide when the AI Trader wakes. A trader can pick a timer of a few minutes, a new bar on a chosen timeframe, or a move in price. Without a trigger, nothing else in the flow runs.
Market blocks gather what the AI Trader should look at. That can be prices, candles and indicators for its instruments, plus the account balance and the positions it already holds.
Model blocks hand that information to an AI model the trader picked, such as Claude, Grok or Gemini, using the trader's own key. A flow can chain several of them, with one model's answer feeding the next.
Rule blocks hold the trader's own boundaries, for example the largest order the flow may send and the most the account may lose in a day.
Order blocks place the trade. A flow can also finish without an order, and that outcome gets recorded as well.
A flow does not have to use every group heavily. The smallest useful AI Trader is a trigger, one market block, one model block, a rule block and an order block. Traders tend to start there and add blocks once they can see how the simple version behaves on demo.
One Flow, Start to Finish
Picture a trader who follows gold on a demo account. Their AI Trader wakes on every new hourly bar. A market block pulls recent hourly candles and a moving average. Two model blocks each receive that picture and return a view. A third model block reads both views and chooses between buying, selling and staying out. A rule block caps the size, and the order block sends whatever is left to send.
On many bars the answer may well be to stay out, and that is fine. The AI Trader still records what it decided and why, so the trader can open an hour where nothing happened and read the reason.
None of this makes a decision correct. The models work only from the data the flow gives them, and the AI Trader follows the rules its owner drew. It does not remove the risk of loss.
Attaching a Flow to Accounts
A finished flow does nothing until the trader attaches it to a trading account. They sign in with an eTrader ID, connect their accounts, and choose which ones the AI Trader should use. One AI Trader can serve several accounts, and each account has its own switch.
Editing is where this saves time. Change a block, and every attached account picks up the new version the next time the AI Trader wakes, with nobody updating accounts one by one. Clients should hear the other side of that too: a careless edit also reaches every attached account at once, so changes are worth trying on a single demo account first.
Trades placed by the flow appear in the eTrader terminal next to the client's own trades. Turning the AI Trader on or off happens in eTrader AI, never in the terminal.
The AI Traders belong to the trader's eTrader ID rather than to one computer. A client who builds a flow in the browser at work finds the same AI Traders after signing in on a Mac at home.
What Your Support Desk Will Be Asked
Once clients start building, questions arrive in a handful of familiar shapes, and most of them are answered by opening the flow.
"Why didn't it trade?" usually has a plain answer. Either the trigger never fired, or it fired and the flow chose to stay out, and the recorded reason says which.
"Why was my order refused?" points somewhere else. Your firm's limits sit above every flow, and an order that breaks them is refused and logged whatever the rule blocks say. Those controls are covered in eTrader AI safety limits.
"Can it trade my live account?" gets a short answer: yes, eTrader AI runs on live and demo accounts.
"Which model should I use?" belongs to the client. The model account and its key are theirs, and your staff do not need to pick one for them.
Where It Runs and What It Costs
eTrader AI runs in the browser at ai.etraderweb.com and as a Mac app. The iOS and Android eTrader apps are the trading terminal and do not include the builder. Your firm installs nothing: eTrader is hosted in the cloud by SGHK and managed by your firm, built to scale across clustered servers as firms grow, with eTrader AI included in the platform. For the wider picture, start with what eTrader AI is.
"If a step is not on the canvas, the AI Trader does not take it. That is what makes a flow something a firm can read."
— The SGHK Team
Key Takeaways
- An AI Trader is exactly the flow on its canvas: trigger, market, model, rule and order blocks connected in order.
- One AI Trader can be attached to several accounts, and an edit reaches all of them on the next wake-up, so changes belong on demo first.
- Each wake-up records a decision and its reason, which answers most questions about why an AI Trader did or did not trade.
- eTrader AI runs on live and demo accounts, and an AI Trader does not remove the risk of loss.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Traders Need to Code to Build an AI Trader?
No. They place blocks on a canvas, fill in each block's settings and connect them. No code is involved at any step.
Can One AI Trader Use More Than One AI Model?
Yes. A flow can chain several model blocks, for example two models giving a view and a third one deciding. The trader uses their own key for each model provider.
What Happens to Attached Accounts When a Trader Edits an AI Trader?
Every attached account uses the new version the next time the AI Trader wakes. Each account keeps its own on and off switch, so a trader can pause one account while testing a change.
About SGHK
SGHK is a FinTech company that designs and builds its own software for the trading industry: the eTrader trading platform, the Broker CRM and the Prop Firm CRM. Every product is written, hosted and supported in-house, licensed to trading firms, hosted by us in the cloud and managed by each firm, built to scale across clustered servers as our clients grow. Everything is encrypted, and each firm is the only one with access to its data and its clients' data.