No, seriously. This is the topic to discuss a decent way to transition from sim trading to live trading. I will share my thoughts, and welcome any comments and ideas. I hope it will help not only me but others too.
Most of you reading it probably seen my other threads about taking part in Combine with Gold, getting to Live Trader status with TST and then the inevitable descent. I am no new to trading live, futures and forex. I used to trade forex on a decent scale for a home trader. I decided to focus only on day trading futures in January 2013 and been doing it ever since. The reason was a significantly dropped volatility in forex markets. But as I expected, for day trading futures are much more better product than forex, because you don't fall victim of broker's feed manipulation and spread scams. I still plan to trade forex but only on a swing based prospective.
Preface
I still have 2 weeks in my new combine to go. I am doing 150k/20d combine under new rules, and currently have a good standing metric-wise but with profit only of 4500 out of 12 000 required to complete it. I won't go into many details, you can find them in my main topic if you wish, but I don't plan to take another combine no matter how this plays out, in near future at least. If I make it to the profit target and TST will offer me a funded account again, I will only accept it under new funded trader contract which has many advantages to the one I signed originally.
The main reason for descent from being a live trader was relying on one instrument and one strategy. It did work well but succumbed in summer doldrums, so I had to implement a new one while being live, as I was not permitted to trade another instrument. In order to avoid such incidents and not be forced to trade market that is not favorable to my plan, I will trade more instruments and several strategies.
In the current combine I traded so far Gold, Crude, NatGas. I don't plan trading Natgas live, at least for now, but Gold and Crude will be my main instruments. Recently I have discovered that YM and NQ also are very favorable to my tape-reading strategy, so I have settled for YM due to easy point system where 1 tick = 1 point, as opposed to NQ with quarters like in ES. Otherwise I don't see much difference. These are not the best instruments for scalping but I plan to hold onto larger trades so high commission cost relative to tick value should not be a stop sign.
Another instrument I am working with in order to add to my live trading instruments portfolio is DAX, German equities index, similar to DOW. It has a very different appeal as it opens at 8 AM CET (EST-6) electronically and pit is open at 9, so you don't have pre-market history of any sort for guidance. But it offers excellent commissions to tick cost rates (commission is around 5 buck per round give or take but 1 tick = 12.5 euro, or 17 bucks) and can produce real nice no-pullback runs great for paying for vacations on a yacht. I cannot trade DAX in Combine so I trade it on my normal Ninja demo with CQG feed.
The plan
I will stay on demo for next 2 weeks and complete my combine. I will add YM to my list of instruments and plan to use it actively along with Crude and Gold. Unless a decent offer comes from TST at the end, I will start gradually transitioning live in the beginning of November.
Setup
I will stay at AMP futures unless I find any reasons to move. I will lease Ninja for a quarter until I decide what feed I will stay with (currently CQG) and if I need a lifetime license, single or multi-broker. (Does anyone knows if I buy a single-broker license can I later change it to another broker or it stay with this broker for life?)
I will get VPS from CommercialVPS which I had a very good experience with when trading forex, running my setups (up to 16 terminals same time) on their rig, 2 servers simultaneously. This is to ensure contigency for internet connection and ease up on access during my travels.