Paper trading
- Thread starter Mirah
- Start date
tradestation has paper trade, so does cboe.com. Learn all the option strategies, entry and exits. Practice exiting an iron condor, the others will come easier. Don't paper trade to long, cap it at 2 months. It's a different game when real money is at stake.
I jumped right into the stock market during the financial crisis...when everyday you would see headlines about major stocks either going up or down huge % moves.
I thought to myself...damn, if I could capture those daily moves...I could make serious money eventually.
That little journey experiment lasted about five months, before I lost 40% of my account value.
I would also go basically all in during Earnings season. I did a plethora of rookie stuff back then...that would just make me cringe now.
I never really Paper traded per se, but I kind of just loosely followed/studied/traded it...in my head...for about three or four years after that
I trade options now, much easier to carve out profits. It's virtually impossible, or terribly slow...to try to carve out profits trading stock.
I thought to myself...damn, if I could capture those daily moves...I could make serious money eventually.
That little journey experiment lasted about five months, before I lost 40% of my account value.
I would also go basically all in during Earnings season. I did a plethora of rookie stuff back then...that would just make me cringe now.
I never really Paper traded per se, but I kind of just loosely followed/studied/traded it...in my head...for about three or four years after that
I trade options now, much easier to carve out profits. It's virtually impossible, or terribly slow...to try to carve out profits trading stock.
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I use candle stick charts, bollinger bands and MACD, learn over sold and over bought patterns, loosely use Fibonacci retracement, elliot wave theory, Trading turtles. pivot, swing, momentum, day trading. Avoid the last one, but read it anyway. Option greeks are helpful when talking to option snobs, i mean theorist. All the technical indicators are lagging. I'm on the sell side. May the force be with you ...
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10 years? Are you serious? But why didn't you start earlier?
Was it just a hobby?
I'm just wondering what motives did you have
48 months.
FxTrade. (It's not the best, by any means, but it's not terrible, and it was a way of avoiding MT4, and that's very worthwhile!).
For the first two and a half years of those four years, yes. After that I managed to give them up, for the most part, and gradually started doing better.
(I left it too late to edit my post above, so I'll have to add another post, now, to offer another thought or two ...)
It's not really about "how many months" (though it may be partially about "how many trades").
You need to know that you can trade with a positive expectancy, before risking money.
It takes people different lengths of time to learn and prove that.
Probably, the more "discretionary" your trading, the longer you should be on demo for: a more rule-based and mechanical strategy may not need so much demo time.
Successful trading is all about risk-management, not profit-maximisation.
For this reason, what matters much more than the (for example, monthly percentage) return is the variability/steadiness of the return; in other words, its consistency is more important than its size. Someone making an average of 2-3% per month steadily over 6 months is far, far better placed to trade with real money than someone making an average of 5% profit over 6 months, which actually represents a mixture of monthly results between a high of 55% and a low of -45% (because the latter person's results are probably random, really.) And that's hugely relevant in determining how long you'll need a demo for.
The number of trades per month is also really important. (For example, a system which wins 85% of its trades but trades only twice a month is going to take far more testing, for the results to achieve statistical significance, than one which trades 8 times per day with a win-rate of 55%.)
In a sense, the question boils down to "How many results are needed for statistical significance?". The reality is that the correct answer depends on a whole range of factors, including some more subjective issues such as your degree of risk-aversion.
It's not really about "how many months" (though it may be partially about "how many trades").
You need to know that you can trade with a positive expectancy, before risking money.
It takes people different lengths of time to learn and prove that.
Probably, the more "discretionary" your trading, the longer you should be on demo for: a more rule-based and mechanical strategy may not need so much demo time.
Successful trading is all about risk-management, not profit-maximisation.
For this reason, what matters much more than the (for example, monthly percentage) return is the variability/steadiness of the return; in other words, its consistency is more important than its size. Someone making an average of 2-3% per month steadily over 6 months is far, far better placed to trade with real money than someone making an average of 5% profit over 6 months, which actually represents a mixture of monthly results between a high of 55% and a low of -45% (because the latter person's results are probably random, really.) And that's hugely relevant in determining how long you'll need a demo for.
The number of trades per month is also really important. (For example, a system which wins 85% of its trades but trades only twice a month is going to take far more testing, for the results to achieve statistical significance, than one which trades 8 times per day with a win-rate of 55%.)
In a sense, the question boils down to "How many results are needed for statistical significance?". The reality is that the correct answer depends on a whole range of factors, including some more subjective issues such as your degree of risk-aversion.
It is.
That doesn't stop MT4 from being a horrible, clunky, nasty, unreliable piece of junk that also displays many indicators incorrectly, but it's certainly possible.
I think that's right: in forums, people generally use the words "paper trading" and "demo trading" with the same meaning. I suppose they're not, technically, exactly the same as one could (at least in theory) do some kinds of "paper trading" without having a demo account at all ... but it's what people mean, anyway.