Keep going, it's all abount time spent staring at the charts to build experience and confidence, better to do that via Sim than real money. As soon as you go Live you'll trade differently anyway, fear and greed are powerful motiveators sadly Try to add some stress into your paper trading, ie wife poors cold water over you if you don't hit target ?? or drop back below, or what ever you can think of. Ofcourse, if your full time and you lose, you go hungry, lose the house the car and the wife might leave you, always an upside
i hit tpo twice then one of them i change the time per profile to day and on expansion i change it to no, this gives the one day charts with the multi day profile to the side, the reason i don t use the volume profile is because i like to flip from the cash charts to the futures charts and the cash charts dont work on the volume profile
you could leave $500 on your desk so that when you lose ,you deplete the pile , might make it seem realistic, vs playing a video game, floor traders kept a position card on them and some carded theirtrades on a sheet so at the end of day they can tally and make sure it matches the sheets you get the next day, all done by computer now i dont think you should have a goal,you should just learn to trade what you see and take what the market gives you,you shouldnt be anxious to get into a trade, you want to develop patience and discipline
I can't share the specific sheets without getting my client's approval, but it wouldn't be difficult to build a fine one yourself. Build columns for product, entry times and dates price levels, daily mark-to-market P&L, max drawdown ( on-the-run), closing position P&L, comments about the trade - that type of thing. My clients can trade live whenever they want to - but strong caveat, I tell them up front that I would prefer to see several months of a track record and Win versus Loss ratio above 60 % before I think they should consider it. Some are above 70 % paper trading before they choose to go live. We talk about SIM trades, paper trades, and even live trades every Thursday night during our weekly group webinar which I also record. During that webinar, I will also go over some client's performance metrics spreadsheets. If a client is feeling like he should be performing better either paper or live trading, that is something that we have individual one-on-one meetings about. I will record that meeting for the benefit of that client. If I believe that that individual meeting would be helpful to my other clients, and if I receive permission from the client to share - I will distribute that individual webinar to all of my clients. For example, I had a client in Singapore who had decent paper trading metrics but he did not want to live trade. Turns out that prior to hiring me to learn how to spread trade, he scalped CL ( crude oil futures ) and got the shit smacked out of him pretty good. That emotional scar was holding him back. When we stepped back and took a broad view of his paper trading metrics, with the benefit of some patience he was able to prove to himself that spread trading and scalping crude oil were two completely separate beasts, and to allow the scars from a previous bad experience spoil a great opportunity was not being fair to himself. I thought he needed to be proud of his metrics and to gain some confidence in all the hard work he had put into learning to spread trade and that he had proven to himself that what he was doing with spreads worked. I wanted him to take his time and not rush things. But he needed some encouragement and self revelation about how far he had progressed in the sense that he had a much more refined, systematic and complete approach to trading in terms of our spread trading system than he did with his CL scalping exploits.
you trade sim til you know whats going on, rather than blow several small accts or one large one learning
If you mean learning how to use and configure the platform, and/or for learning what's going on with an automated (no human interaction/interference)strat, I agree. Trading sim as a means of learning "how to trade" (unless you don't know how to place and modify trades on the platform) isn't real-life, and has been pointed out by others, trading live is different than trading sim. And to that I say, then what's the point? I lost 10K today trading sim. What do you want for dinner? I earned 50K today trading sim. Damn, my car insurance is due!
If you're feeling different when you are trading live compared to demo then that is sign that you aren't properly prepared to take risks.
Generally speaking, humans have no control over neurochemicals and the mental and physiological processes and emotions that may be triggered by their release or suppression. The feeling different isn't about being "properly prepared" to take risks. It is about the mental and physical states that dynamically occur when one has a real-life trading experience. In this case, actual money to be gained or lost, among other validations or discredits of a persons own belief system. As a "how to trade" aid, sim trading is very different from live trading, and to that I say, then what is the point ?
Thank you ammo, Ok, I have the Volume Profile on the chart. Can you please let me know if I have it set up correctly? How can I determine the ES daily VAH, POC, and VAL with thinkorswim?