The way I see it, you paper trade for 2 years until you have a winning system. Then you have to learn to trade real money which might take another 2 years to get your head straight around the FOMO, Hesitation, fear / greed etc. Unless you have some psychological skills in gambling from poker or some other betting games. Now in this time frame your edge from paper trading may have disappeared... so back to the drawing board and in circles you go. I maybe completely wrong here but that is how paper trading looks to me. I like this method better... Study, make rules based on observation, trade small with real money to test, then increase size if profitable.
trader99, All that sounds good. 1. But why in the world would I risk my hard earn saved cash trading with NO edge and NO Positive Expectancy? 2. It cost me $0.00 to trade paper til I prove to myself I have an Edge and Positive Expectancy. $0.00, free. However, if you wanna give me about $20,000 to start trading, I can PM you my palpal, I can start live trading. Let me know what you think. My personal quote "Get the Motherf%%king Simple Things Right First"
i doubt that very very much (even though 2 years better than the original "few days") it may take not 2 but 10-20 years or all one's life (or more in most cases) to develop the method... and all the discussions above are not about trading a method, it's about building one when method is ready - yes of course you trade the method with real money......until you realize that its not a working method yet
HUH?? Did you read my posts????? I said to papertrade/sim trade first. That's why I simtrade 10 lots. Real account only 1 lot. But if you are not there yet then continue to simtrade until you got your edge down. Then use real account.
Paper trading is just that. Of course it is good practice getting the mechanics down. But trading is not practice. And that is when you find out if you truly have an edge.
It's not all peachy. You have to trade the right instruments. I make money when I trade NQ, ZW, NG, CL, etc. But I lose money every single time when I trade GC. Thinking it will bounce higher. It does go up a little then say fool ya! Then goes back down. Very frustrating. On days when I don't trade GC I make money. So I will stay away from GC from now on... Until a REAL trend. I guess I could have shorted it too. Stupid me. We all have our faults and blindspots.
I would start papertrading ES,NQ or Euro futures before tackling Crude or GC. Those two have so many factors unrelated to what you see in the charts affecting price action that you can get chopped up even paper trading...
Trust me...CL is a lot different when you go live rather than paper trade. The curvature of the expiration months brings in a lot of other factors then simply studying price action to scalp intraday. It is volatile which is why it attracts people who are snoring over on the ES screen. But not everyday is a trading bonanza and fx futures sometimes trend better intraday and have less economic report surprises during RTH than crude.