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Ninja Trader 8 SIM Account without "SIM" at the beginning
Is it somehow possible to trade simulated and make it look like a live account in your performance report?
What I mean by that is that the account name in the performance report starts with "PPP" e.g.
Or is that absolutely impossible and I can be 100% sure that someone is trading live if he shows me the performance after his trade and this shows an account name that does not begin with "SIM"?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
This is an important question. We have seen some variation of it many times on nexusfi.com. As a general matter, I do not think that you can ever be 100% certain that someone who wants you to think that they are profitably trading live is in fact doing so. Why? Well, one reason is simply that any image you see on a computer screen can easily be edited by using simple editing tools. Or, for that matter, could probaly be faked by other means.
And since there is money to be made, someone will do it. This doesn't mean that whatever you are being shown is faked, only that it can be, and you probably won't be able to tell.
As to your exact question about whether a Ninja sim account has to say "SIM," I found this recent post by @NinjaTrader:
Client side NinjaTrader created simulation accounts start with "SIM", that is correct. NinjaTrader does not always know if a broker/ISV provided account is real or simulation. To NinjaTrader, its just an account.
)
Basically, this means that you can tell whether a sim account was set up by the person on his/her own PC (it will say "SIM"), but not if it is a sim account supplied from an external source (for example, all the trade evaluation firms, that are assessing your trading ability for a funded account, use a trade service's simulation server.)
And you can't know that one way or another.
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So I think the best way to put it is that there is no way to be 100% sure. If you have a question about a particular vendor or trader, I suggest you look for a review of them in the vendor review section of this forum, or start one about them if there is nothing already out there. This way you can get the benefit of other traders' experience with them. (Use the Search box in the upper right corner of every page.)
I would also remind you that vendors have a motive to get you to send them money, and you should always check them out before accepting any claims, especially any claims about how profitable they will make you. There are many good vendors, but also some bad ones. The ones who promise you more are likely not the ones you should be quick to trust.
Be careful out there.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
If this is the situation you have, I'm afraid I don't know the answer. Obviously, a person could not trade for long in an evaluation type account, and it wouldn't have the person's name anyway. This was just the example that came to mind when I read the quote about using a sim account set up by a "broker/ISV" (broker or Independent Software Vendor, I assume.) I don't know if there are other situations where the externally-created sim account would apply.
Also, I do believe that in NT7, you could easily set up a sim account with any name you wanted. Apparently, not in NT8.
Someone else may be able to provide the answer for the exact situation you face.
Essentially, I would not want to consider anyone's trading results as 100% certain to be genuine unless I knew them or had seen a large number of reviews from satisfied traders (preferably traders I knew from other posts I had read of theirs) who had used whatever that person was selling.
But that's just me being skeptical, having seen a lot of fakes over time. I'm afraid you will need to make some judgment calls here.
I will repeat the suggestion to either look for an existing vendor review, or open a review thread for this person and ask for feedback. Of course, if this is a purely private individual who would not be known to others then this would not help you.
Just be very cautious about anyone who claims to be a very successful trader, but for some reason wants to receive some money from you, which I assume is what's happening here, in some form. The best question to ask is always, "If they're successful at trading, why do they need money from me?" There may be a good answer, but the answer may be the obvious one.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Even if I showed my live trades on my live DOM showing my real live account number, it wouldn't matter because it can all be faked. You only have to look at PitBull Trading to know the lengths he went to covering his tracks making it appear as if he was trading live from a live account all in NinjaTrader. He made one slip up and was exposed for the fraud that he is, although he continues to fake it every day with his YouTube videos and they won't pull him down, I have tried.
For curiosity purposes, his mistake was showing his resting LMT order of 20 contracts on the DOM, yet the DOM market depth for that price level was much less than the 20 contracts he had resting, and not inclusive of...yet he still tried to tell everybody we don't know how the DOM works! Such a fraud.
Anyway, given all what @bobwest has just stated, if this vendor is offering an indicator or a strategy etc. I would demand a free trial. It baffles me that vendors don't do this. If he has a trading room, demand a free trial.
Asking for brokerage statements these days is futile, because a simple computer script can fake a days trading in 30 seconds and have all the ''correct'' information shown.
You need to live and breathe in real time what the vendor is offering. If they can't do that, walk away.
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- Trade what you see. Invest in what you believe -
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Perfect advice in today's world, but I always fear that if the question has gotten as far as whether trading results could have been faked (the answer is always that they could have been), then someone is too close to losing some money.
With that said, sure, there are genuine people out there too. If they are offering a service, they should give a free trial. If someone were just saying "trade with me," or "invest with me" or "let me trade some of your money for you," I would want to watch them trade, live, by some remote access software that let me view their screens in real time (there are a bunch of those, including Windows built-in functionality), while I also watched the same market separately on my on PC. In other words, I want to be in some sense standing right behind someone, looking over their shoulder and watching them trade, in order to be convinced enough to give them some money.
Is this paranoid? Look at all the reviews of vendors on this forum before you decide it is.
And yes, everything might be completely genuine. It's always a judgment call in the end.
Just be careful.
Bob.
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Edit: I just re-read @JonnyBoy's post again, this part:
Dang. That even blows up my remote viewing idea, doesn't it?
The moral of the tale is always, "Be careful."
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Indeed it does. I have requested on numerous occasions that it should be mandatory (in the NT ecosystem for example) for EVERY vendor to provide a free trial for their product(s). Whether that product is an indicator, a strategy or a trading room.
I reckon that would eliminate a high percentage of the vendors listed, so NT would probably never do it. However, with the Agile.net NinjaTrader specific version, obfuscation of code is available and virtually impossible to crack, so that excuse from any vendor is a weak one.
Even if you do find an expert good enough to crack it, they can only stop the authentication of the NT licence and they won't be able to get inside the code. But, it is becoming harder to do and it takes time and money, and likely more than the cost of the indicator itself. Usually much more depending on the encryption.
There are no excuses to not have a free trail from any vendor. In fact, IMO FIO shouldn't allow any vendors on here unless their product has a free trial. Just my 2 cents.
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- Trade what you see. Invest in what you believe -
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I'm working on a trade replicator: a master Ninja instance will send its orders/trades to slaves/clients. So basically a vendor could have the add-on on his desktop running the super great money maker bot, and his prospects will see in real time (or so, minus the network latency) how it goes before purchasing it.
It would be interesting to see how many strategy vendors would be ready to use this, not so much I presume .
Quick video: a remote machine on the left (my development VPS), my desktop on the right.
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