Paper trading is beyond useless unless you are backtesting a known strategy, different broker processes and completely different psychology on live trades. If futures are too much capital risk you can look at forex micro lots on high timeframes, which is a smarter option until you know what you are doing with futures. The markets are about the perfection of parting you from your capital, if that risk is not there you will learn next to nothing because it's the foundation of all trades. But because it's too simple a statement neither the talkers nor the newbies have anything further to discuss and therefore believe it doesn't exist. Which is why 99% of traders fail because they take something as simple as money and make it complex rather than what the smart people do which is take something as complex as the markets and make them simple.
The expectancy is to earn 1%-2% a week. I'm not near real time trading. I'll be looking to swing trade if and when I do.
My advice is to spend 90% of your time finding a way to prove, to yourself, that you can earn 1-2% a week. In other words, method development. Do this with at least 1000 trades. Spend the other 10% familiarizing with software and market structure.
Is this really possible through sim trading, I need to read up method development, know of a place to start? or this this something I'll just figure out as I go. Does it seem reasonable to swing trade 1-2% a week? Thanks for you help BTW.
If you going to swing trade, Ninjatrader software is free and you can get EOD from Kinetick for free. If you want free delayed data www.barchart.com has charts, stocks, futures, options. But if you going to want real time data you will have to open an account somewhere. I think TOS is only good for 2 months of free? Best to have an idea of where to enter, protective stops and where you going to target. Most go at it alone, really don't know any books on paper trading, many of us eventually learn how to program our ideas to see if they work and I won't use less than 3,000 sample size, and some of day trading sample sizes been over 20,000, more data you can test, better you can expect whether it will do ok or always know whatever the drawdown is what you are testing, at some point, you will exceed those losses in real life. Account size and knowledge dictates how much you can make and even with much knowledge, you will still have losing trades and drawdown, so prepare yourself mentally that you will have losses, best to have many of them practicing, but remember that it is 99% study and 1% at the most of trading for most traders.
Someone on here that runs a brokerage had said in the past that paper trading is for learning your trading platform - how to put the various order types, alerts. etc. but is useless for learning how to trade. I could not agree more. Learning with a small position is recommended - small meaning that even if you take a major hit on a trade you will not lose more than 1-2% of your trading capital.
Just keep reading books and studying price development from open to close. It takes years, and you'll likely quit before you come close to any trading success. Good luck.
Small positions rock - much harder to get shaken out of a trade. It's one of those odd trading paradoxes - when you go small you often make more money.