I know you're asking overnight, but I would like to add in my own viewpoint. What I have seen in myself is that what I do in Sim never matched what I do live. Perhaps the lack of discipline even in this regard is a huge red flag which is affecting my progress, but its true.
Trading even 1 micro lot is very expensive. I cant remember if you're trading the ES or NQ, but NQ moves so much, even for a micro. Unless you're just operating at the very edge of where you think price will turn, a 10 point NQ stop is nothing in this market. But this represents a $20 loss. Take 5 losses in a row, and you have a $100 loss, which honestly is quite a bit of cash if someone is just working a regular hourly job. So I can understand why a trader might want to go with Sim first.
But then I find that you won't be practicing what actually needs to be practiced, which is having skin in the game and money on the line so that fear and greed have a chance to get involved.
Because I'm not in the US, I don't need a 25k in the account in order to day trade stocks/ETFs without hitting the PDT rule. If you want to trade NQ, but a micro is too much leverage, you can trade 100 shares of TQQQ. It works out to about 1/3 of 1 micro NQ contract if I recall from my rough math. Trading 100 shares for me at IB works out about 20-30 cents in commissions, which is favorable to the micro future. The liquidity is huge, with a daily volume of well over 100 million shares.
The nice thing is that you can even practice scaling strategies if that is your thing. Buy 50 shares at 12,000 or whatever, and maybe another 50 if it goes 20 points lower. Many traders who I think are successful and have shown their charts to me often "work" the trade, meaning they make multiple entries and exits.
You can even trade just 25 shares. If price drops 50 points, its literally about $3-5 in losses. This is almost bad for me because it teaches me to use much wider stops, and then you also need a much higher profits just to cover commissions, so 25 shares is almost too low, and so there is a sweet spot of 50-100 shares I think. But I think trading this would be much better than Sim. There is no point in Sim trading for years if going live causes you to fall apart in 1 week when your issues end up being something you didn't even get to practice.
