say goodbye to trading, you will be great. find something more productive to do, make life meanful. I strongly suggest you quit this effort. Jessie Livermore, a great trader in old times, he commited suicide. he went broken several times, he did make lots of money but he failed. trading is againsts human nature (greed and fear). why you want to trade, becasue you think you can make money (greedy) or in another word beat the market, the reality is the market is out of your control, it does not care you making money or not and you are not able to beat the market in the long run. just like cutting loss, the smaller the easier. do not follishly suppose you are able to make it! most people will not, even those great traders! a gambler always suppose "this is the last time, if I win back my orginal stake, I will walk away", so the gambler lose more and more because he stick with "last time". quit it immeadiately!
Your trading situation and mine are similar. We both use Ensign with range bar charts and the volatility study stop. I have traded ER in the past but I have gone back to ES. I have been trading for years. I still am using the simulator on NinjaTrader rather than trading real money. I am older than you. For me, there is no option other than to keep going. I correspond with other traders who also have been trading for years and are still searching for a workable method. I expect this will bring replies saying we are all losers. Maybe so but I donât think so. I hope that this helps.
I would hope there might be more hope here on this board. All I seem to hear is there is no way to make an investment and get a return on it in the stock market. Jesse Livermore made and lost many fortunes from what I read and maybe he was not a happy man for many reasons, that I do not know. I would like to think there was a way to invest your money in the market and get a reasonable return so that the conditons of ones economic future could be taken care of. Is there not a person represented on this board that can help us and give us some ideas of value more tahn just run. Is there not a person making any moeny in the market?
On daily basis, Epiphanytrading is posting it's "stock List" These stocks are the stocks that are in play. Trading these stocks through lows and highs might help your profitability.
Did you read the thread I linked to? You should read the whole thread: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=125840
You have to trade differently. You will find a post by EpiphanyTrading that will give you a list of stocks to trade for the day. If you short the new lows and buy the new highs, you can do well. These are my results today.
I have not read the entire thread, but some ideas to consider. You goal now is to learn to trade, not to make money. You will want to make a very small investment in the trading itself -- one lot. Forex is interesting because you can have a very small pip size -- ten cents. So your max gain or loss for one day is unlikely to be more than $2. Once you start to get a good trading plan, you can increase it to fifty cents, and then a dollar. I do not recommend a simulation account. IMO, that is a waste of time for someone with the mechanical experience of making trades.
Pretending to offer advice masked through a very general and very vague trading concept is only going to give the OP false hope (assuming he's still reading this).