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So I've spent my first week ever on the sim and watching the ladders this week, I've been watching the US treasuries (from Australia) each night, they trade size but they don't have much volatility and I found myself getting very bored psychologically I felt like I was getting nowhere so I subscribed to the CME/Globex feed for the ES..
I opened it up early well before 8:30am (Eastern US), it was trading at a "medium" tempo, not too fast, not too slow, within the first 5 minutes of watching it I scalped my first tick in my first sim trade on it, my entry/exit strategy worked and with the market only in front of my face for 5 minutes a pleasant surprise.
Not long after this I made my second trade and the exact same thing happened, my fondness grew, I then left to do some other tasks and came back during the mid morning session (US) and damn this thing looks a lot harder to read now but I jump in like the cowboy I aspire to be (lol) I get in my third trade at first it was going well a tick in my favour but soon the market quickly shot down a couple of ticks below my entry, probably not enough to trigger where I would place a stop but perhaps it was however it then shot back up almost immediately to where it was so I quickly got out for the tick, this was just on the sim but really I should of scratched the trade before it shot down, sometimes it sweeps so a bit of automation helps.
The final trade I made soon after and this trade literally lasted 2 seconds, I clicked in 1 second passed and I seen it shoot up to my target then one more second to close the position! wow! after I looked at the P&L and seen I had made up a point with my 4x1 tick trades, I then accidentlly turned it onto live mode, the trade box lit up bright red which is the colour I set it to so I don't accidently trade live, the mouse was on the dom and I only have the touchpad so I brought up the start menu via the windows key and then moved my mouse away and clicked out of live mode.
In conclusion I am left feeling light headed, like I've been on a rollercoaster the whole ES experience has been great so far and I think I'm hooked, I will probably post up another inverse thread when I get burnt? stuff that though, let's think positively, sorry treasuries but I'd rather learn by being thrown into the deep end.
Keep an eye on the overnight highs and lows when the US sessions opens, a lot of the time you get some nice action/rejection at these levels in the first 90 minutes of the US session!
@Revan The ES is a good market but is also extremely efficient. Some discretionary traders do trade better under pressure and the "rush" as you say. However, this is a trap because you have to keep bumping up the risk to keep your performance and eventually something has to give. As such, it is better to establish your trading from a more neutral emotional perspective, though probably some "activation" is probably required to trigger market cognition. There's a misconception that tape reading requires lightning fast reflexes. Sometimes fast reflexes would be useful but most of that game has gone to automated strategies. Tape reading is not about being fast on the mouse.
What you want to do with your training, the goal so to speak is to compare your internal state in the live to the sim mode to validate that you aren't trading in an emotional way that would negatively impact performance. But, if you haven't developed enough proficiency in sim then you don't have anything to compare it too. It gets very difficult when you start to lose because as a trader you want to make the right decision but you can never be sure that you haven't started to trade differently. That's why I like to think in terms of control variants or invariants and variants.
