This is a screenshot I took of my demo account today I started with 1,000,000 now I am at $1.27m.
The first 5 or so trades I lost miserable because I was just trying to understand trading, the past few trades I've been analyzing charts and trends and have been profiting nicely using margin.
If I had a $10,000 budget to begin in real life would I not have 2700$ in profits following the exact same trades ???
in realty your risk is diff, you'll react differently, it's real money, a whole part of your psyche kicks in that you cannot experience in sim mode, in sim mode the slippage isnt there and you'll rarely if ever get positive slips, the effect of stops is not the same... make all your decisions about the trade and not about the money
in reality your risk structure from the beginning needs to be minimal with a small advantage that you can place fractional trades to forward test, such as a 1/4 contract on gold or spx...while it may seem too miniscule, you need to forward test while taking on all within the auction process.....catalogue patterns, video trades where possible or at least screen capture, revise at the close of each session....avoid having your account balance open, have the positions summary tab open if you have to.....you need to work on memory of contracts and sizes that you have open while remembering the levels your trading...while you can mark levels of pricing you need to concentrate on several levels of price ....
here's the downside to cfd's ....theyre very expensive relative to many round trips with the only advantage that youre not incurring any more costs when you scale in/out in smaller sizes.... say you take 50 contracts of one instrument which might be the equiv of 2 whole contracts in the underlying fute....if you scale in/out your cost is the same regardless but if you roundtrip it's expensive relative to the actual fute in many cases....weight for weight it's expensive but, in the fute if you have 2 contracts open all you get to play is 2x1 but the strategy can be diff on a cfd due to break down of a single contract...so, cheap, if say, youre learning with a 1/4 size contract your paying the spread which could be $1 or 4 points, whereas, the fute only needs to tick and you could scratch the trade flat with no loss, but, the cfd would need to travel 4 points to scratch even, ...so you see how expensive cfd's actually are in reality on a whole round-trip pro rata....you are in reality trading or recovering an instant loss...be absolutely clear about that
another challenge is that the feed is not bourse fed....it's a market made platform.....you need to understand what the instrument is being governed by, what is driving the data...for example you cannot look at 'gold' and say oh this is what gold is doing, you'll need to be cognizent of underlying futures markets and how theyre constructed so you wont be surprised when the spx cash goes down to 1640 but the cfd goes to 1639 before reversing and the cfd is not the same as the es ( i've tried/tested all the bollox tracking/correlation)
'tracking' what(?), is the question ...ask your friendly account assistant to tell you what determins price....there is a chasm between tracking and following...
another challenge is the bars are less than empiric ....go and look at ninja t videos and then compare them to cmc ...nothing beats concise clarity
be clear what youre using the platform for...fully understand the diff between leverage and margin....start with cash size small enough so when you make your gaffs they wont hurt you (your account size needs to withstand a large series of drawdowns, hence fractional contract size as well as fractional position size)
:smart:
edit:
the "dom" is completely useless....of course it is....there is no ladder the underlying fute ladder would not work (horse n cart) mostly because the pricing would confuse you even if you could receive ladder feed gratis
edit2: the sentiment is of limited value...might only serve to give you confidence, if gold is at 83% long all common accounts you can be sure a shake out is coming....but such things have a cr@p flip-side, meaning price length can travel much further against you while youre waiting to gain on the 'fade' of the sentiment.....done it, burnt on it...learn it on small size and then forget about it....lol
edit3: indicia - haha!
edit 4: indicia - still laughing......
