Wow, some excellent responses this morning. Thanks a lot to all who have provided thoughtful advice and commentary. To answer a few questions/comments: -I'm using the Strategy Runner platform by Global Futures. You can place trades directly from the chart, which is pretty cool. I plan on using this when I finally fund my account. It's largely received good reviews on this site, and they've been excellent to deal with, which are both encouraging. -I'm currently up $1,210 for the day and have really only made a handful of trades (5 - 7), and have probably spent less than 30 minutes looking at the platform. No open positions. Still trading a single CL contract, nothing more. These results have been roughly the same for the days since I began this thread, too. Not reading too much into it, besides the fact that it's encouraging to a guy who's always had an interest in trading but has always felt a bit overwhelmed about the whole thing. -Slippage does exist doing this sim. I often enter with limit orders, and cover at market, which usually costs me a penny or two. Criticize this if you want, but it's been working for me so far, and I'd rather just exit ASAP and lock-in my profits.
6 years ago I ran into a website called collective2. There was a strategy on the site at the time called coin collector. The strategy ran on strategy runner and had excellent *real time* result from simulation. It made money day in and day out and in real time. What it does is it waits for 60 minutes from the open and then put a buy limit order on each 60 minute bar low and a sell limit order on each 60 minute high and exit at end of day. I didn't know about the logic at the time but it was easy to spot after a few days looking at the chart. I opened an account with Global Futures and ran the strategy on Strategy runner. I ran the strategy in simulation mode for a week or so and then I put in real money. I put in $50K and in about a month I more than doubled my money to $120k. It was so easy I thought I was gonna make a million real soon. Then things started to turn south. What happened was the non-fills I've mentioned above. The strategy was a reversal strategy using limit orders and in case of a non-fills I won't get the reversal trade at all while in simulation mode the trade would have been reversed. The end result was the real time result was very different from the simulation over a longer period of time and in the end I end up closing the account with only $25k left. The thing is there are a lot of strategies being sold on strategy runner which I would consider as scam. They are designed to trade frequently, win frequently (high winning rate with small wins), and slowly breeds you to death by some occasional limit order non-fill discrepencies (missing a few winners here and there). In the end the non-fill discrepency makes all the difference. It happens slowly and is not easy to spot early on. I'm not sure if this would apply in your case but I figure I would share my experience so that if your case is similar you would spot the problem early on. The only positive thing about this whole experience was it introduced me to trading. 6 years of full time trading and never look back... Hope it helps.
Cool story - nice to see that in the end, it turned out to be a good experience (longevity as a trader). Thanks for that. Personally, I don't really have any interest in automated strategies anyway, so I'll be sure to steer clear of what they're selling. But yes, the fills are what scare me the most.