Just of the top of my head (I am not a day trader or expert); 1. You need to study market makers and dark pools more. 2. Either you are a day trader or an investor/swing trader. It's hard to be both. 3. Your stop losses need to be MUCH tighter. One day you will wake up and the/a market has dropped 20-30% over night. You may not be able to close your positions. 4. Like you said...2019-2021 was more random trading. SIM trading now does not take into account dark pools or MMs. Chew on it if you would...
1. Sure, I'll look into it. 2. I think with the amount of leverage inherent in futures, only day trading is practical. As you saw in my long post, even in my large losses, I was correct with my macroeconomic prediction.
World is your oyster. Just fyi, there are many times I've cursed at myself and wished I just became a plumber instead. I think I probably have some kind of OCD condition that pairs nicely with software, computers, and algo trading though, lol. Blessing and a curse sort of thing. I had pretty good results from 2018 to 2021... beat my benchmark. 2022 was rough, I didn't get crushed but got beat slightly by my benchmarks. It lit a bit of a fire under my ass though and so I kept at it and by Q3 I had turned things around, in a big way. Since then I've been on fire; basically printing money, great sharpe. IDK if it will keep up though and I don't like harboring expectations. One day at a time, ebbs and flows. What are you defending yourself from? A misunderstanding? When you said "it's not" it was in reply to @Overnight who was yelling that sim is fake. I thought you were referring to sim being [more?] real in some way, not some other even older post. So, I thought it was funny. Let's face it... you seem to be putting a lot of stock in your sim trading. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's EliteTrader. Hostility and condescending remarks are the norm here, not love. I don't see too much of it in this thread, though. Consider it tough love. What if someone showed up here and said they read a few books on being a surgeon, have practiced on a few dead animals and now want to start operating live human beings? Would you encourage that? Or if someone had practiced a bit on Flight Simulator and wants to fly across the Atlantic tomorrow with a real air plane full of human beings? I think most of us just want FarmerJohn to get more realistic expectations, avoid losing his hard earned money and realize that there's a lot more work to be done if he should be able to make a living or a fortune by (day) trading index futures.
Who cares if he's a millionaire or not. This thread is about discussing trading strategies. You have something to share, let's hear it.
The problem is, in their haste to pound FJ into oblivion, they've also concluded that both forward and back testing is useless. So anyone who mentions it deserves the same beat down.
It may sound like that to you, but you're certainly overgeneralizing. No one said this exactly. Testing is very useful... it's just not a panacea. There can always be unknown mishaps mid-flight.
%% EXACTLY,LOL [1]Several big problems are known from the get go\ he gap/super gap jumped from $14 ,000@ SCHW to 50 contracts ES. 777] But in[FJ] Farmer John's favor, he knew that was not a good idea, but '' exciting.'' 888] FJohn needs an exciting hobby, so he does not try to get his buzz from the markets, 999] He does not try to predict waves so that's something else in his favor OVER big size is one of the most deadly things in the market\ + that's also why you so seldom see a 00.50 caliber\ even a 00.50 caliber empty brass shell. .22,30,38 +.45 are much much more common+ for good reasons. Our family/ for family fun went target shooting= 00.22 short+ 00.22 long rifle\ but 10 commandments of gun safety[ RISK RULES] were + are required. NO USa law against 00.50 caliber, but the points still stand.