You'll notice that LW would make highy leveraged day trades and then also have overnight swing trades of a smaller size. He used very tight risk control and traded with the trend. This are important points in a discussion of whether techniques are still valid and yes they are--.
You are brave man investing in a system that you haven't seen the backtest results. You are even braver since you withstood the DD at the very beginning.
If you are convinced the system's results are fairly stable, the way to trade it would be to operate in sim mode until you hit a big drawdown, ie the 50% or close to it, then start trading with real money. Ideally, you would have a couple of other, non-correlated systems to do the same thing with.
Depends on other factors If your trading accounts total $1,000,000 and then that $20,000 contest account isn't going to have much effect on you Also depends on your risk tolerance And precious drawdowns If you sweep your account weekly to protect from non insurance situations then it's less of a big deal. Also is the 47% drawdown produced from trading only 1 contact, 5, 10, 20, 40 ?