No quite true sir. The value in many of the posts on ET including @volpri's is not their "secret source", or methodology or formula but because they stimulated me, took me off the beaten path. And maybe, just maybe there is a small pot of gold at the end of the path. I am a techie at heart, always look at a problem first from fundamentals, try to derive from first principle. Day trading is very difficult because the first order macro approximation is random noise which means to first order, no predict will work. I am building a method starting from that point of view.
And there also lies the painful truth to your eventual failure: you went in without an EDGE and merely hoped and prayed the market would look after your best interest. But you were smart to risk only monopoly money. Next time, find an edge first (whatever that may be). Then, run your sim. Just running the damn sim for a whole year means nothing.
Thanks for the scolding. In all fairness, I did 6 months of testing, thought I had a small edge, before I started the sim. Why I ran it for a year? Because it takes that many trades to get a statistically significant result.
Sorry that it needlessly came across as scolding. But it wasn't meant as a criticism. My point was, and I mentioned this several times elsewhere, you need a profitable system to begin with. You can't just endlessly backtest and tweak and optimize, which is what paper trading really is, and pretend you'll somehow end up with a winning formula in the end. It ain't gonna happen. This endeavor has been proven futile by all those programming nerds who thought they could simply code their way to success. There's no shortcut in this game. And there's no magic bullet.
Is this serious? You already tried the different suggestions and finished that in a few days? If so, you're vastly underestimating the task at hand.
If you bought ES at the Open today with a 5810 target - that's an R/R of 1:10 with a 5 point stop. 5 points risked for 50 points gained. Of course, these don't happen every day, but they do happen once in a while. On average, you should be able to risk 1 to gain at least 2. With scalping, you're only picking up the crumbs and typically taking a lot of risk doing so. For a typical scalper, you'll have 10 green days in a row and give it all back on day 11.
Can we say the initial push from open last for 1h in average ? Do you have a statistic like that ? To me it looks the first 1h30 are pretty much correlated, most of the time. Might be wrong but there seem to be intraday cycles. In conjunction to the U shape.