Did paper trade really help you to become profitable?

Tradesuperstocks said:
I traded options and my size was pretty big since I double downed twice. Bought BA calls, and it dropped.. So I doubled down. Etc... Then I jumped in nflx earning puts, expecting it tank after earnings... Stocks did open red but my puts also lost money due to time decay and premium lost... Huge mistakes... I think I will stop daytrading and options now. Swing trades might suite me better.
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Options, especially when you go long is a leverage instrument and low probability if you are ATM or OTM.

So for us newbies, I suggest you try this (what I did when I started): If you have enough funds to buy 100 shares of XYZ, use 2-3% to buy XYZ options if you believe XYZ will go up a lot in the time frame of your option expiry. The balance can either stay in cash or buy 97 shares of XYZ.

Do it this way, your risk of ruin will be quite low.

And read up on Kelly criterion.

Best wishes.
 
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Tradesuperstocks said:
I have been papertrading two months but not daily.. More like one trade every two days. This is a lot harder than I assume. I thought I was consistent but when it's real money, I started to sweat out and did not follow my rule. I tended to add and double down my position.. A lot of things too. So I decided to take a quick break. . At least doing 2-3 more months before jumping back to market with real money. So damn hard to find a real coach for this. All the chatrooms did not help. Wasted money and these room coaches dont really teach you. When I direct messaged them, just being ignored. So I stopped subscribing these chatrooms. A lot of them are full of beginners and posted tickets like penny stocks and I hate it.
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WOW 2 months!!! I have spoke to few surgeons who have told me trading is harder to learn than becoming a surgeon, so would you go to a doctor 2 months out of med school and only looked at surgeries? You are in same arena with people who been trading their entire adult lives, so doing it couple months, well...and losing 15k, you must not value money. Eventually, you lose concepts of money if you doing well anyway, it is a by product that shows whether you winning at the challenges of you against you.

Do you know how to program? Makes for backtesting huge amounts of data to form healthy 3,000 sample size to see if your method is worthy, to better understand sizes of drawdowns. Trading not knowledgeable is for who start too early to just burn money, and people who think this is easy, think again. Double down? This is not Blackjack and deck full of 10's, you add to winning positions in stocks. When I backtest weekly data, I will go back 25-50 years if stock been trading that long and go back 15 years for day trading, these sample sizes over 20,000, I want to know everything and anything I possible can to find lowest drawdowns.

People who trade don't have time for those who won't help themselves, new traders are time bandits, we have a life as well than spend many hours and hours with someone who thinks we just can't wait to teach people how to trade. I would rather eat worms than teach someone who don't have a clue and already displayed that.

I always suggest this, sim trade $25,000 account, triple it three separate times, never risk more than 2%, when you have been able to this, you have a better shot of coming out of the gate. Otherwise you are going to be "bait".

When you can breath charting, you have better idea of what to look for, excellent free site.
http://thepatternsite.com/index.html

Free software and data till you use it in real time. Learn to program this software.
https://ninjatrader.com/LP/FreeDown...ng software demo&utm_content=Trading Software

Paid charting software.
http://www.nebadawn.com/

Good luck
 
I actually have been on and off in market since 2012. I started off in 2012 and got burnt nearly 30K after buying some penny stocks with my friends. I quit...Then in 2015, I saved another 25K and started to buy some IPO with friends...got burnt again...All gone. Took me another 4 years to save up another 50K and here I am, losing another 15K...

I think daytrading isn't working for me...I learnt all about indicators, technical analysis, but still can't win this market. This is extremely hard. Papertrading is not the same as real trading. When I am in real trading, my body starts to sweat out when seeing market against my position. My biggest loss was last week on a BA calls and CVS calls. Both of them lost nearly 50% and I just stared at my screen hoping it's coming back...At last, I liquidated and accepted the loss.
 
It is not that day trading is not for you, it is just that you have not found a strategy that works for you and your personality AND to find that you are playing much too big. You should be losing hundreds when you are wrong not thousands.
 
In all my years as a broker, I have not seen a positive relationship between demo/paper trading to success in the markets. In other words, if someone just started trading a market without any demo time, I could not say that he would be worse off than someone that paper traded for a lengthy period.

I think that there is an inverse relationship between prolonged periods of paper trading and real-time performance. Those who spend prolonged time ( I have seen years) and then try to trade the markets in real time have a tough time transitioning to real-time trading, and quite often halt their trading quite a fast. The conclusions they often make is that they have not spent enough time on paper trading, when in fact it's the opposite. They have picked up habits in paper trading, that is not "translatable" to real-time trading. Having skin in the game makes all the difference. Going between paper trading and real trading does not improve performance as far as I could see.

Paper trading is an excellent tool for learning software, observation, backtesting a method, and observing the market's past behavior. But, it does nothing in practical terms of performance. In my personal opinion, improving a method that trades in real time is way more effective than going back and forth between real-time trading and paper trading.
 
Tradesuperstocks said:
I actually have been on and off in market since 2012. I started off in 2012 and got burnt nearly 30K after buying some penny stocks with my friends. I quit...Then in 2015, I saved another 25K and started to buy some IPO with friends...got burnt again...All gone. Took me another 4 years to save up another 50K and here I am, losing another 15K...

I think daytrading isn't working for me...I learnt all about indicators, technical analysis, but still can't win this market. This is extremely hard. Papertrading is not the same as real trading. When I am in real trading, my body starts to sweat out when seeing market against my position. My biggest loss was last week on a BA calls and CVS calls. Both of them lost nearly 50% and I just stared at my screen hoping it's coming back...At last, I liquidated and accepted the loss.
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Two trades and you lost 30% of your capital, your trade size is way too big.
 
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