I've been forward testing and continually refining my system at www.virtualstockexchange.com for almost 2 years now.
Without getting into the specifics, my style finds strong stocks that are temporarily pulling back and vice versa. That's a simplistic description, but it captures the basic logic behind my system. There's no guarantee it'll keep working, but what I've just described, in my opinion, will always occur. I feel that the logic behind my style is logical, simple and robust. Successful backtesting and forward testing (on paper) has only encouraged me.
Why would he? I wouldn't. Annoying active EliteTraders for 25 years in a string alone won't be enough to become a trader. You will need to actually read 2+m of books on diversified trading subjects (a 5m pile on Gann won't cut it mate), do all the paper trades & analyses detailed in there, try everything you can, exchange, paper trade in esignal or whatever for a coupla years - Once you're profitable consistently (try 65-75% hitrate on stocks intraday & a sterling ratio of 1.5 or higher), you can consider trading lots of 100 shares - Just to gently introduce you to the psychology of real-life battle. Once you've done that for 6 months successfully, you can start increasing your positions. For an average person I'd say trading heavier than that in your first 6 months is outright silly, since you will stop / be impaired from absorbing knowledge when you're psychologically challenged by your net P/L... (Swimming in Adrenaline, that is...) As for the slippage & comm thing, testing trading systems, I'd say here that personally, I rarely go less than $0.03 (3 cents) - if not 5 cents or more per share, often 10-20 cents for s/c, if your system still shows returns. Look at NTES for example - Using nothing more than a 10EMA crossover on a 10-M chart, considering $0.10 s/c per trade, you would still have returned 23.61% in a total of 15 trades for the last 5 days tested, with a %profitability of 86.66%. That's just hypothetical, and c/s can be more than that. However, trading can sometimes be so simple it's boring - That's what you have to try looking for. It works well for me. It sets off the remaining liquidity I have left after holding/shorting futures contracts. This way my money is always in the market (also day & swing - trading equities) If your choice stock doesn't look this good even in a backtest - forget it. The reality is always worse, never better. Hope or good faith has no place in trading. Dump the stock and look for a better one. Look at a few. Just looking through the 500 most important stocks should be enough for now... Good Luck, ~Scientist Good Luck on your journey with a 98% chance of failure! ~Scientist.