May be we get what we paid for. That said, scalping for pennies means commission will be a big % of overhead.
you are most welcome another good tip is to wait for times when the market is not complicated. like this chart of today's PA be patient and wait for easy money
Which futures contract on the Hang Seng (I find myself in the Southern Hemisphere) is best to day trade ie: the equivalent of the ES or NQ?
all this may be right. but rather than fight the conditions just wait for one that suits you. When you have the edge and trade when the market is not complicated like the chart below. You will make a lot of money trading only when the market is not complicated and you have an edge. I am not saying trading is ever easy even when the market is not complicated but you have a fighting chance.
everybody is fishing in the wrong place and time. trade at the correct time and money is easy. that is what i have learnt after 30 years of market participation. whatever type of trading you are doing
The TOS PaperMoney Sim platform has some very suspicious quirks that was bugging me for sometime. I finally got hold of someone at Schwab who was familiar with the simulator part of the platform. Here are the quirks: It is simply an artifact of their software, no getting around.... The display on the sim are "almost" real time. There may be a very small time lag that any discretionary trader won't notice. But, when to fill, what to fill, etc. are algo driven, even if one set it to real time. The time lag and fill "queuing" are features of the software and one has to live with it. The types of order matter, e.g., market vs limit, typically orders with stops and profit targets take longer. With him on the phone and sharing screen, we made both sim trades and real time live trades. Live trades had very little time lag, all < 20 msec. Sim sometimes took > 3 sec.! It means my sim results are not real. He said for someone trading >5 min charts it doesn't matter that much but for someone like me triggering trade with tick by tick and scalping a few ticks at a time, I need to go live to test my methodology. After a year on sim, I think I was able to "game" the simulator, anticipating the lag and traded accordingly to get my profit. Now I have to "unlearn"! Hope springs eternal.
See, this is exactly what I was saying! Staying in SIM for months means that you're perhaps learning something that you can't apply in the real world, so then those skills will actually have to be unlearned. I don't see why you don't just trade 25 or 50 shares of either UPRO or TQQQ. You'd be risking like $10 at most for what would be a healthy stop in ES or NQ. This will real world experience while limiting damage.
Good points and good questions. The value of a sim is I can try all crazy ideas without any worry and believe me I had tried tons of crazy ideas. None worked. Maybe this one is also an illusion, another mirage.