You are being very conservative. When I make 2.25 points I get around 108 in profit. I don't paper trade. I usually enter on limits and almost always sell with limit orders.
interesting. This is quite embarrasing, although at least my journal is called 'ES learner' but here in Europe, alot of traders generally trade through 'bucket shops' called 'spreadbet' firms - so there are no 'limit orders' and 'market orders', and ill be honest, im not entriely sure how this affects me. For example on my demo I ofter get in on a 'market order' and im immediately .25 in the hole because of the spread, which is fine (im used to being in the whole nearly a whole point with my spreadbetting firm). When you use limit orders, is this still the case? Im gonna set my commission to a ridiculously big number today so that i can know for sure whether they are already calculated in my overal pnl. I dont want to be TOO conservative as i just wont have a hope of winning, lol but once i get teh commissions to definitely show in my pnl, ill set them at a 'fairly' high price and stop adding on further 'random costs' to make it nice and hard for myself. would you say my results are quite typical so far? I'd like to know how im doing - i have nothing to compare with really. thanx for your input.
ok, this is quite encouraging. It appears that ive been paying my commssions twice! I just changed them from $5 to $100 per roundtrip to check, and placed a random market order and clsoed it straight away at the market again, and my current pnl is -$214! This means commissions have been working all this time..?... I need to confirm this but it looks like my results so far should actually be a fair bit better. Im not gonna change past results tho, although it does give me some confidence, as it seems that ive already been paying the commissions at $5 per roundtrip, and adding on another $5 per round trip in my calculations manually, and adding on another $15-20 or so per day, and im still 2 green weeks and one red one, and it 'shold' be a green one aggain this week, unless i really mess up today. Summary coming when ive finished for the day.
your results are next to useless. you need to open a brokerage account (or spreadbetting account, or whatever). you need to experience what the commision structure is when actually trading, as well as slippage and other fees. fortunately for you you won't have to pay taxes on your winnings (if trading from the UK), and that needs to be factored into your overall game plan as well. in closing, you need a lot of experience, period. don't think this fantasy trading/accounting that you're doing is in any way relevant to actual trading, it isn't.
Anyone notice we're in the process of forming the head? Looks like there will be no larger reverse HS now pointing to a break upwards.
-2 today. 6 trades. No point in posting my blotter as i was experimenting with random trades earlier in the day to see if my ninjatrader commission actually affects the pnl and it turns out it does, so it look like ive been paying 2x comission on every trade since i started the journal. So today = -$140 gives this week: mon - +$180 Tue - +$150 Wed - $+175 Thur - $+60 friday - -$140 TOTAL FOR WEEK - +$425 TOTALS SO FAR: total week 1 - +$470 total week 2 - +$505 Total week 3 - (-$635) Total week 4 - +$425 Not entirely sure im gonna continue with this journal, but thanks for input. We'll see. Later.
Thanks for that really informative post. That, the way the Ninja demo works, is the way i wish all demo platforms worked with regard to fills. One demo platform i'm very familiar with is the Thinkorswim demo. I don't know the exact criteria it uses for a fill, but i have noticed that you will get a limit buy fill when the "last" price on the dom reaches the bid!, whereas you should not get filled on a buy until "last" reaches the ask. And checking the tape there will be no print at the ask equal to your limit price near the time of your fill. This has the effect on ES, which during RTH is a 1 tick wide market, of giving you 2 ticks in your favor for every round trip because the platform has the same defect on sells, where it sells on the ask, not on the bid like it should. I have writen TOS about this problem two or three times (email) but never received a response. Normally they are very good about answering email. So what does that tell you? Obviously, if you were a broker trying to build accounts you would like to have your potential clients, who were trying out your software, be successful. But in my case i'm no newby, and i noticed right away i was getting unrealistic fills. I like the way Ninja does it. But tell me, does the Ninja demo use live data (Tos demo does). It seems that when i tried the Ninja demo a good while ago now i had to use simulated data. I did not like that feature. I did not have an account with a broker where Ninja was available, but was just trying out their software, so if you have a funded account and the Ninja platform can you use the demo platform with live data? By the way my goldfish, Henry, is pretty darn smart.