It's been a long couple of weeks with sick kids and dog, meaning little sleep. I'm happy to say I didn't lose my rear, but I screwed up just the same, and others can use it as a lesson if they wish, or ignore and say it couldn't happen. I was trading the EC from 7 - 8 central this morning, and then canceled everything and went to see the last kid off to school. Came back at 830 for the open as usual and got situated, did some calculations and looked for setups. For the next hour I took 4 trades, all profitable. Looked like a great day. Only problem, I forgot to switch back to my live account from the sim side, so all I can go buy today is a sim hamburger. On top of that I was fortunate that an order I forgot to cancel in the EC on the live side form earlier didn't get hit while I was sim trading, as I didn't notice it in the control center until I was throwing a fit about screwing up. Overall not a a horrible event, but stupid just the same. I know I'm beat, and should have taken that into account this past week and had my old check list out to run through to verify I was good to go. Ahhh, now I have vented and I can take a break and maybe a nap.
I believe you. The same thing happened to me. I forgot to switch to the sim account from the live account. On Monday night, I was playing in my IB account. After I entered a trade, it turned against me. I thought I would leave it alone for the night and come back in the morning and see what would happen. After all, it was not real money, I thought. But next morning, I logged into the sim account and couldn't find the trade. Then I switched to the live account and found, to my horror, I had placed the trade in the live account the previous night! I lost 15k because of that mistake.
If this story if true....you definitely should quit trading since it is fairly obvious that you are not the sharpest tool in the shed....
I do a lot of sim trading and have always opened my sim account on a separate PC. Even with that precaution, I have to be careful, because I often am testing a strategy with the same stock/future I trade live. The act of watching charts and DOM all day can mesmerize you into a loss of focus. Taking too many breaks, you miss setups. These are the pitfalls of day trading.
Been there...done that...occassionally still doing it. Only a full-time retail trader from home with a family will understand what happen. In fact, as soon as my kids get a little older, I'm going to rent an office space near my house (walking distance) or near my kids school (walking distance). Get use to it and the days of being a single man while trading is gone. It's now truly a 8 to 5 job. Mark
It is amazing how this happens. In forex I did not have this problem since you had to log into a different account to sim trade, but in futures, its just a drop down menu on the DOM to change between the 2 and everything looks and works the same. So in the past 2 trades I did profitably in sim while I thought I was real. 1 trade real that was profitable while I thought I was sim. Of course I wish my bad trades in real would have been in sim. I think this is also a good reason to trade exactly the same in sim with the same number of contracts that you do in real since you don't want to be doing 100 contracts when you normally do 10 and find out you were doing it in real and the trade does not work out.