For the newbie traders.
Paper trading in TOS is intended for people to get used to the platform and practise entering and closing different orders and stragegies. The information is 20 min. delayed, so the prices are not at all accurate, what you could expect in real money trading. Plus they give you the mid price, which also is not accurate. There is also the risk factor, government by the emotional fear and panic factors in making decisions that make paper trading account in TOS not applicable to the real world. You can blissfully trade a 10 contract lot in paper trading, whereas the emotional, fear and panic factors in real time trading, would change your decision making tree and you will find perhaps only 1 contract is all you dare trade with of your savings.
Once you have learned the entry and exit order system of the trading platform and you have opened a real cash account, you will get real time data, or as close to it as you can get. For paper trading, this is better for you to practise with, using a piece of memo paper, writing down the bid and ask numbers from real time data, to get a more accurate financial representation.
On a per contract basis, your expenses per trade per contract run around .15 cents. The end costs will be somewhere between .12 cents and .15 cents. If you trade stocks, with wide bid and ask spreads between the prices, the costs escalate. If your trades are just .20 cents and .30 cents, you can see you are not left over with much. At the end of the year, you also have to give the IRS 40% of any total wins. So keeping a written record is necessary of your real money trades.
Paper trading in TOS is intended for people to get used to the platform and practise entering and closing different orders and stragegies. The information is 20 min. delayed, so the prices are not at all accurate, what you could expect in real money trading. Plus they give you the mid price, which also is not accurate. There is also the risk factor, government by the emotional fear and panic factors in making decisions that make paper trading account in TOS not applicable to the real world. You can blissfully trade a 10 contract lot in paper trading, whereas the emotional, fear and panic factors in real time trading, would change your decision making tree and you will find perhaps only 1 contract is all you dare trade with of your savings.
Once you have learned the entry and exit order system of the trading platform and you have opened a real cash account, you will get real time data, or as close to it as you can get. For paper trading, this is better for you to practise with, using a piece of memo paper, writing down the bid and ask numbers from real time data, to get a more accurate financial representation.
On a per contract basis, your expenses per trade per contract run around .15 cents. The end costs will be somewhere between .12 cents and .15 cents. If you trade stocks, with wide bid and ask spreads between the prices, the costs escalate. If your trades are just .20 cents and .30 cents, you can see you are not left over with much. At the end of the year, you also have to give the IRS 40% of any total wins. So keeping a written record is necessary of your real money trades.