imho all those exercises should have one main purpose: to create correct definition of trend, s/r (there is nothing else)and how to work with them u can start with your definition now, but it should/will change
Oh I follow you SunTrader, the multiplier is 5. Was just reporting the points to keep it simpler. But I'm stopping this anyways - their paper trading platform SUCKs.
Sim is not useless, it's just a different thing than trading live. You use sim to master your strategy and go through the motions, you go live to master your emotions. It is quite a lot easier to learn to run when you know how to walk, why make it harder on yourself and not learn to do your strategy before learning to do it while getting shot at? No soldier is going to tell you that shooting at a range is useless, and that you should learn to shoot while at war. It's equally preposterous.
You're done with shorting penny stocks with your hundreds of thousands of dollars account? https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...shorting-weird-issue-regarding-margin.319894/
To paraphrase Mike Tyson somewhat "Everyone has a plan {from sim trading} 'till the market punches them in the mouth {trading account}."
No, I shorted some today in fact. Why would me playing around trying to learn trading mean I have to stop doing anything else?
True. But you seem to be positing someone won't have a plan if they don't sim trade or just because they do sim trade they will have a plan. As well that they won't get punched in the mouth as long as they have a plan and have sim traded first. If someone wants to learn to swim they can watch all the instructional videos they can get their hands on but until they step or better yet jump into the pool they will never really know how to do it.
So, first day results trading in real account, but just 1 share of SPY: Sold 262.68 Bought 262.89 loss -0.21 Bought 263.19 Sold 262.84 loss -0.35 Sold 262.86 Bought 262.32 gain 0.54 Bought 262.83 Sold 262.66 loss -0.17 Sold 261.81 Bought 261.83 loss -0.02 Sold 261.59 Bought 260.42 Gain 1.17 Sold 258.37 Bought 258.95 loss -0.58 Bought 258.90 Sold 258.30 loss -0.60 Sold 258.30 Bought 258.58 loss -0.28 Bought 258.58 Sold 259.23 gain 0.65 Sold 259.06 Bought 259.25 loss -0.19 Bought 259.48 Sold 259.08 loss -0.40 Sold 258.89 Bought 259.52 loss -0.63 Bought 259.52 Sold 260.15 gain 0.63 Total loss (0.44) Meh, that's like a 40% plus annualized return loss! I think I need to look at the bigger time frame bars, was looking at like 30 sec and 1 min, spotting trends there. I see immediately what you are talking about qzr1011 - what looked like a trend on a short time frame chart was nothing on a longer time frame chart. Will do 5 min on Monday.