Fear of loss. Your problem is psychological. Losses are inevitable. Learn to accept it. Winners have to be at least x3 average loss.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Actually most do better with trends[study trends than noise [don't study noise] Hope this helps it helps me; wisdom is profitable to direct.
Every trader thinks as he place order market goes against its trading .It happens we have to wait for some time market will change its position . if our analysis is good then we will get profit pips certainly closing at once trades as market changes its position is not a good way of trading.
Making this simple, if you deploy money, and you wanna take money from the market, there have to be someone that at least loose the same ammount you are trying to take out. Thats why your trades in demo are wins. There is nobody who has to pay you.
Futures are zero sum like you say but some use them as insurance and shouldn't mind taking a loss, no?
Not exactly and often not the case. You can lose $1500 and then 3 people can win $500 each. Therefore, just because you lost $1500 does not imply there's one person out there that profited $1500. Now take this further into reality in the age of algorithms. You could have a losing trade of $1500 and then 15 algorithm systems from around the world could each have $100 profit. The goal in trading, if you're a profitable trader, the money you make (profit)...you remove "some of it" from the game...put it in your bank account, pay bills, pay your kids education or whatever. The rest of those profits, put it back into the market so that your account can grow. You do this because the odds are high for retail traders to not be able to benefit from their profits or eventually one day lose those profits and much more...resulting in the end of the game. Therefore, if you been pulling "some of those profits" out of the market and benefiting from those profits...the sting is a lot less when the end game occurs. Keep some of those profits and then if you lose the next time around...those on the other side of the trades did not get all of it. Simply, the net change in your benefit is not zero because you were able to keep some of those profits and then use them (e.g. pay bills, pay off your credit cards...essential things that needs to get done). Reality, futures have transaction costs. Your transaction costs is most likely higher or lower than those on the other side of your trades. That reason alone is why your loss or profits + costs is never equal to those on the other side of your trades because their costs are different. By the way, those costs is more than just commissions and fees...something you'll understand at tax time.
I don't know that this is exactly answering what you are asking, but... For a long time there was little correlation between my sim trading and live. But that changed to where there is now essentially no difference; and that was one of the more important steps in my progression as a trader. I stopped having to pay tuition to learn. And my learning sped up as I was less frustrated, I experienced a different POV. Basically I realized it was the perception of money as I was trading that was the difference between sim and live -- so I took steps to take the money out of it both in sim and live. I removed all ways to track it from my screens. I made the mental choice not to think of it until the end of the week. Most importantly I funded my account with enough extra money that I wasn't worried about losses (that is to say that if I equaled my worst week ever, I'd still be OK... even for multiple weeks in a row). With those two practical steps (removing all ways of tracking profits and loss, and funding my account to an emotionally comfortable level) --- then I was able to consciously choose to trade sim and live the same way. It still took some thought and work to establish new habits, but it was doable. That was the start of everything changing in a consistent positive way for my trading. Before I was just going in circles. After I learned this things started making sense.