Ok, I am done for a few hours. I've played about 5 (round-trip) trades, and managed to be profitable. Next time I'll play I'll try to do the same. Once I can make a rule out of this profitability on about a dozen of trades at a time, I might try to increase the number of trades. However, once it becomes the norm, I will develop some confidence in my (technical) analysis, and such confidence will also be there when I trade with real money, and, if that happens, I'll trade better, and finally, hopefully, become a profitable discretionary trader.
My trades and performance vs buy and hold. When it says "2" trades, it means one round-trip trade.
Comparing my results with others, and comparing buy and hold vs my results.
This
trading simulator is a gift from heaven, because it's better than any other trading simulator. As it speeds up the charts, which is not achieved by IB's paper trading account. I believe this is the best single tool available for learning technical analysis, if you can only get yourself to use it long enough, without getting bored with it.
I never considered this before: being consistently profitable does not mean that you have to be able to
constantly pick overall profitable trades. It obviously just means that the trades you pick are overall profitable. No one is forcing you to trade incessantly. One guy could be profitable by making 100 trades per day, and another guy could be profitable by only making one trade per day. Maybe the guy who can make 100 trades per day is slightly better. Maybe he has improved over time.
What this simulator has taught me very clearly is that the same person (me) can be profitable in his first 20 trades and unprofitable in his second 20 trades. And this happens constantly. It has taught me that my judgement gets worse over time. It has taught me that I have little patience and a short attention span, and that I can only make 10 good trades at a time, but nonetheless it has taught me that I
can be profitable, if I trade at my own pace. And even that I
can take my losses, once I know that I am capable of wins as well.
I will now have to practice a lot more to see if this is really true and I can have a sequence of 10 overall profitable trades at any time, on any chart I am given. Once I develop total confidence in that, it will just be a matter of adapting my skills from the customizable speed of the simulator to the constant speed of the markets (if that can be done): obviously the real market does not go forward when i click a button (like on the simulator). It goes faster and slower, depending on the timeframes, but never at the optimal speed for me. If I wanted to see an acceptable speed from the real markets I'd probably have to trade 1 minute candles, but that may be too fast and then I would not have enough time to detect s/r levels, and commissions and spread costs would kill me.
The one thing that spoils me in this simulator is that you can make it go forward exactly when you're ready for it. It would be like playing tennis with someone and be able to freeze the other player for a few mintues, to take a break. It would as if you were boxing and were able to freeze the opponent to evaluate him and then avoid getting punched by him. The real market keeps on moving, and by the time you appraise it, it might have punched you with a move against you, and, without a preset stoploss, that will hurt so much that you won't be able to react, and keep him from punching you further.
With this option to freeze the other player (price, your opponent), this simulator takes all anxiety away from trading (also for the fact that you're not investing real money). However it is a very good tool, the best trading tool I've ever found. Better than any book, manual or similar.