Good riddance. This forum is for Elite Traders, not demo traders. Maybe Yahoo forums might be better for you.
tycoonman, your not alone, virtually every retail trader I know (myself included) has failed to trade ES profitably over time.
. In the last few weeks, when Japan was hit by the quake , international markets took quite a beating, Once they and the bot traders realized that this was a natural incident and therefore should not have affected world markets the way it did, markets in the west began to recover just as dramatically as it tanked. Right now , the Wall St. is still in that 5th gear mode , and anyone, even a dart thrower would have been able to make easy money . To the OP......good luck with your trading , but use your ears a little more than you use your mouth .
Making money can't be this easy? Well without sounding too harsh- it isn't that easy because you aren't making any money. As others have said go live and you will see it is much harder when real money is on the line, especially large amounts! Go live, make plenty of mistakes and learn from them.. then you will be on your way to becoming a trader. Demo account is just practice before the big game.. what really counts is that matchday performance
following up on what Brownsfan said below, and as an alternative with regard to the ES, I think if you subtract two ticks from every winning trade and make each losing trade worse by two ticks and then are still satisfied with your paper trading after a few months (you need to experience both up and down, slow and fast markets) you should do OK with real money. Keep accurate track of the number of winning and losing trades and the average win and average loss. Good luck. P.S. I would not use mental stops, if I were you. In fact I would get in the habit of knowing exactly were I'm going to place my stop before I enter the trade, and then get that stop in quickly.
Fundamentals mean nothing in ES. You best plan is to keep a calender of all economic and earnings releases as this is when you will get most of the unpredictable action in ES. How many contracts do you plan to trade with 5k ? One problem I see if you are targeting 1 to 3 points on these trades but you are using a mental stop of 5 points. When you hit a drawdown and make 3 losing trades in a row it will take more winners to get you back to breakeven. I would say use no more than 3% of total account for your stop. Mental stop also leave you with a deer in the headlights look when you get caught offgaurd. You should use a hard stop on every trade and enter it as a bracket order so it is valid as soon as you get in the trade.
I went through this exact things some years ago. It's not as easy as it seems. You just have not experienced a different cycle yet.