After the bot has earned it with sustained live results — months of trading through different market conditions, not one hot week. And scale in steps, not leaps: raise the size by a fixed increment, watch for a while, repeat. The same percentage drawdown takes far more dollars at bigger size, so your nerve needs testing too.
What should a bot prove before it gets more money?
That its live results hold up over time and across conditions — a stretch of months, not a lucky streak. One hot week tells you almost nothing, because any strategy, including a broken one, can win for a week. What actually counts as evidence: live results that roughly match what testing predicted, behavior through at least one rough patch, and drawdowns no deeper than the tested range. One counterintuitive check: if live results are much better than the backtest, be more suspicious, not less — you may be looking at luck that hasn't run out yet, and scaling up is exactly how people hand luck's winnings back. As a rough floor, three to six months of live history is reasonable for most strategies, and longer if the bot trades rarely — evidence accumulates per trade, not per day.
Why scale in steps instead of all at once?
Because each step is a checkpoint where the strategy has to re-prove itself at the new size. A worked example using +25% steps: start at $2,000. After a solid stretch, step to $2,500 and run for several more weeks. If results hold, step to $3,125, then $3,900 — roughly doubling in three verified steps.
| Step | Allocation | What you verify before the next step |
|---|---|---|
| Start | $2,000 | Live results match testing |
| +25% | $2,500 | Results hold at the new size |
| +25% | $3,125 | Fills and costs haven't worsened |
| +25% | $3,900 | You're still calm during the dollar swings |
Jumping straight from $2,000 to $20,000 skips every one of those checkpoints at once.
What does the same drawdown cost at bigger size?
More dollars — and dollars, not percentages, are what your nerve actually feels. A 20% drawdown at $2,000 is a $400 dip; the identical 20% at $20,000 is $4,000. Same strategy, same chart shape, ten times the money gone from your account. This is where scaling quietly fails: traders who sat calmly through drawdowns at small size shut a healthy strategy down mid-drawdown at big size — locking in the loss and abandoning the system precisely when it was behaving normally. So before each step, ask one question in dollars: "if the already-tested drawdown happens tomorrow at the new size, will I let it ride?" If the honest answer is no, don't take the step.
