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Simulators/Demo's are misleading, 7 months ago I had started one demo trading journal here, I had similar thoughts as you. I had it deleted recently because it was creating gap between reality and what I thought I can do based on my demo performance. Just in case if you are wondering, I had multiplied many of my demo accounts. I also code my own indicators so I needed to test them often but none of my real accounts were able to give me same expectancy.
You can only address problems which are real, and those only surface when you have real skin in the game.
Unless you can treat virtual money as real, its not gonna do anything. Maybe you can, but its a very very rare thing. There is reason why most people who come to market blow up their savings, they get overconfident due to demo's. Take your time trading real account, even if you have to scale down, trade with real and establish real baselines. That way you will also know faster if you are made for this or not.
This is just my pov and observations of myself, they need not apply to others. So take it with pinch of salt.
I tend to agree entries are the least important part of my trading as well. Almost to a fault actually.
Yet... they ARE AS important IN RELATION to your exit as any part of your system.
On the simulator I like take fully random entries and try to manage my way out. Over time Ive found I suck at entries anyway so I just try to fade myself.
Where we disagree (and thats totally fine) is the "I don't care size".
In my opinion this is always A MUST no matter what size account you have. It does not matter one bit about anything else.
If you risk .05 percent MAX on every trade for the rest of your life you will either blow out because you absolutely can't get this or your under capitalized... period.
I heard Big Mike or FT71 (where the hell had this guy been my whole trading pursuit? Just found him recently and can't listen enough. This guy IS GOOD!) say something to the effect of take whatever your results were on even live sim and cut them IN HALF! FULLY!
That struck me but it shouldn't have because its happened to me time and time again.
I became very successful when I dropped the charts. I only use the DOM, and primarily trade treasury futures. I wasted 3 years on technical analysis. The big traders at the big firms are using the orderbook as their main trading tool. Perhaps we should follow what the big guys are doing :P. I don’t think it’s impossible to make money on chart trading, but statistically my performance has improved massively since I switched to the orderbook.
Josh Waitzkin won World Championships in chess and martial arts. He wrote a book on how he learned to be the best of the best. It is called The Art Of Learning.
The very VERY most important thing to learn when trading is to position your size properly in conjunction with a known stop. The stop should ensure that if it get hit you do not lose more than 1% of your portfolio. If you want to be successful this is key. Then next is to have a strategy that you know works more often than not. Accept a losing trade and take the loss. Accept a winning trade and take all profit per the strategy.... let it play out. If your strategy says take 1/3 profit at a certain point, and another 1/3 at another point... let the trade ride to that and follow your strategy. Let the profit run on the last 1/3rd of your position until the strategy tells you to exit. The reason I say this is that you will get losing trades. It is hard to accept a losing trade. But your mindset may have you take a tiny bit of profit on a winning trade and then exit too early.
Tradingview.com ( free version ) Click on "Ideas"> then click "Educational ideas"> ScottBogatin< start listening to those videos while you search for your markets and your style as well as other things to learn about. ( it's free )
Hello,
I became very consistent trading stocks when I stopped day trading them and started short-term swing trading them after purchasing Metastock software and several add-on software packages. I initially subscribed to the real-time data package but then lowered that to the $27.00 overnight data package. I purchased many add-on packages and after as you can string them all together, but eventually found about three or four of my favorites that give me a short list to enter the at night with stops and targets or trailing stops with no targets and break even profit levels. I usually will let these run for from Monday 3 or 4 days max, Monday thru Thursday or Tuesday thru Friday.
When I got profitable swing trading stocks, It was time to get consistently profitable trading index futures. I was doing OK in Tradestation but no consistently. I switched to Ninjatrader and became less consistent for some reason until I started using SharkIndicators BloodHound and BlackBird along with some third party indicators from Ninza.co and LizardIndicators. I found out that I am not a good index futures discretionary trader and needed to automate trading strategies and also enjoy automated them. I enjoy developing the strategies, back-testing them, forward testing them on historical data, forward testing on live data, sometimes performing Monte Carlo Simulations and performing forward optimizations where appropriate. I have 5 strategies so far I have been running on the e-minies with nice results. This works for me and may work for you. At least you may consider these approaches. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
I believe many here got have provided some good advice..
I found Price Action as a great way to read the tape as it is unraveling.
Just keep in mind that Price Action must be taken in context and not traded in a vacuum. That was one of the mistakes I made when I first started trading.
If you go one step deeper and learn about volume .. What happens in High Volume areas vs Low Volume Areas..
Deepen your understanding of why a market does what it does.. Revisit certain areas only to reverse.. Or why some days rotate while others trend ...
Using this knowledge with Price Action is what has turned my trading around....
