I am just not having much luck when it comes to timing. I would enter into a cooling off period, blow my account and the next day or so 3 stocks run 1000%. The best thing that has ever happened to me was WIMI and EQ for a 300% gain in my account but that's about it. Obviously, I wasn't able to grow it from there. (Hence, I am here now.) I suppose, my only option would be to make another small deposit next month and see how it goes.
If in that post you meant the speed of fills I haven't noticed any difference transitioning from demo to live. I don't think this is a execution issue or your order being at the back of the line. It's probably just lazy coding. Back in 2008, broker platforms were not very sophisticated so if you place a market order before the market open it will likely just glitch out. Happens to me even on my current broker. If I place a market order even a second before the open it would just hang there for the rest of day unless I manually cancel it. This happens for halts as well on stop market orders. If it unhalts down and goes below your trigger the stop market order is left hanging there.
It's the fills. They are always perfect in paper trading. And in paper trading, nobody is watching your orders.
Sorry but I think I am not offering much here anymore. Best of luck and I am sure you will find your answers, or they will find you. <grin>. If you want you can read about open auctions. https://jot.pm-research.com/content/7/1/7. It was an interesting read.
Nobody ever heard of slippage? I manually, tested a trading system that was getting 70% winners with huge gains, tested it in 118 trades. I figured, it might work even if the win rate and returns were to come down. Guess what? The slippage from the fill prices totally, wrecked it apart. Out of 7 trades, only 1 was a winner by a small amount. Of course, I was prepared to lose a small amount to find out if the trading system was any good. Utter failure. On the plus side, my risk management and position sizing rules kept the losses small. So, no biggie.
Exactly. Paper fills are perfect. Exactly as you order. Real world fills don't work that way. I traded my IB paper account up over 1M LOL! If I could have done that in the same time period with my live account, well I would probably be too busy to be in this thread right now.
Were you scalping? I can see if you were using a scalp strategy and you got instant fills when adding liquidity it would be very easy to make 1m. I think that may be an issue with the sim I am using. It gives me very fast fills when adding liquidity. I think it puts me on the top of line. I haven't really notice it since I am removing liquidity on 80% of my trades. I will have to test that out tomorrow. But as I said, I hardly add liquidity and don't scalp so even if that was true it would only be a small advantage. I've been profitable paper trading using purely a swing strategy and came on top of a league where everyone had a 2 week head start over me. (The fills or slippage hardly matter if you hold for longer periods.) I am still convinced my problem is more psychological but I won't argue that paper trading gives better fills. https://i.imgur.com/PgbD1L9.jpg
Mostly I did it trading ABCD or Bull Flag type setups, pharma stocks under $20 sometimes under $10, lots of general penny stocks too, loading up, trailing stops up tight. Talking up to 100k shares. You can do that, paper trading. They are gonna fill immediately with no sliding and sell just as smoothly. Set a trailing stop and bobs yer uncle. When a penny stock is getting pumped n dumped, if you jump right on it when your scanner alerts on a low float penny stock trading at high relative volume going up 10% in 5 or 10 minutes, and set a trailing stop as soon as it takes off, the downside is almost nonexistent and the upside can be 1000% or more. 500% is common. You got to get in right away, though. Don't try this with real money. Sometimes you get the alligator, but sometimes the alligator gets you. And you can't do it when you are trying to play $100k or more. Even $10k you are moving the price with your orders. Probably half the pump n dump victims don't know any better. The other half DO know better, but are sucked in by the potential 10x winner that they just never seem to get just right for some reason. Especially if they have succeeded gloriously in that sort of setup in paper trading, where it actually does work. Pure scalping isn't really my thing. Too much busywork. I like to buy a stock that is trending up, when it is on the down side in a dip and it has dipped and resumed climbing at least twice already in the current trend. So I am sort of combining mean reversion (for the entry) and trend following, (for the exit) most of the time. This, in live trading. I haven't been doing a lot of ABCD trading this year. Trend trading has worked really well in bullish conditions and it lends itself well to overnighting. I am under the PDT threshhold since I resumed trading a couple months ago, and an overnight hold saves me a day trade. I have done very little paper trading this year, mostly just when messing around with python and the Alpaca API. Been there, done that, and trading just for fun is only fun for me when I can win some money doing it. For a change in strategy or conditions, I will paper trade a bit. Usually just a couple of plays.
When your trading big size on penny stocks as Ross Cameron would quote. "I am adding at 3.20." "Adding at 3.50 for the break of the half dollar." "Adding at 4.00 for the break of the whole dollar." "Adding at 5.00 for the break of premarket high." Jokes aside, that's how he gets in with big size on trash penny stocks. I would never trade the way he does without 10k followers to piggyback my trades.