Exactly. If he really believes the market is out to get him, as many amateurs do, just stop now. Either drop the conspiracy theory or learn how to really trade.
You're not telling the entire story or the demo platform you are using is extremely flawed in comparison to its live trading platform. Getting back to not telling the entire story... Lets pretend you demo the platform for 2 months during low volatility trading conditions and then when you went to real money trading the market conditions changed to high volatility. Thus, its the changed market environment that's the problem for you and not the platform difference... A changed market environment you failed in adapting to the different type of price action. The above is a common scenario for traders that demo too long and then decide to go live when they see the intraday ranges starting to expand. Simply, they think they are going to make more money or at least the same as the demo while not paying attention that they need to adapt their methodolgy because its really not the same market condition in comparison to what was occurring when they were on demo. Another common scenario is that the demo is on a different data feed that's very slow in comparison to the live trading data feed. Such will allow for favorable market fills especially during fast moving price action. Another common scenario is that your live trading has discipline problems in comparison to your demo trading. Once again, unless you tell the whole story...tough to say what exactly is your problem along with tough to provide you with a solution. Simply, I think you're doing something wrong via not make the appropriate changes when going from demo to live trading. Last of all, a demo should only be used while still developing a trade strategy and/or learning how to use the broker execution platform. Therefore, demo trading does have at least two useful purposes. Thus, once you've have a strategy and when you know how to use the trading platform... It's time to go to real trading. Mark
This is all silly. We all know that it comes down to one thing, REAL MONEY! Those flickering numbers and pretty candlesticks take on a whole new meaning when they equate to your own cold, hard, cash. Its funny, I honestly believe that 90% of traders who have spent as little as 1 month watching the markets, know exactly where the market is going on a short term basis. Thats the reason everyone is successful papertrading. unfortunately the second real money comes into play, emotions take over and we no longer see the world so clearly.
Thank you to those who have helped an absolute newbie understand more about paper trading and going live. In retrospect it is ludicrous to think that someone would use my ip address to trade against me. I apologize for the ill-conceived question. I use IB Book Trader demo. I will now trade predominantly live as advised. Ross