PitBull said:
I have just finished reading all 97 pages of this thread and must say what a fantastic and informative thread it is to a newbie like myself.
I have been stuck with my trading for sometime, mainly trading UK stocks over a week to a month, but just got too emotionally involved riding the highs and lows. Therefore I have decided that intraday trading the US market will suit my personality better, i.e. like to bank money everyday, no holding positions overnight, like the fast moves and I can trade the evening session when I get home from work.
I am a student of Naz but I need some help in getting myself ready to trade.
Firstly is the cost of subscribing to all the different chart, news and level II packages. Whilst paper trading I want to keep this cost as low as possible.
Secondly is choosing a broker with a small minimum deposit. I don't want to commit $25k to open a day trading account as I dont feel I will be ready. Can I choose a broker that will give me all of the above whilst I paper trade on their demo platform?
I thought GNI might be worth it, as I could demo trade on their platform and they have a £5k minimum, plus 10/1 margin.
Can anyone give any advice?
Many thanks
Hi Pitbull
I too had a day or two with NAZ.
I used these guys (see website below) to trade a demo account with and also did a 30 day free trial with esignal and briefing.com
http://www.directaccesselite.com/
The benefit of using the demo account was gaining some experience with the Level II screen and the order entry interface.
The main problem I found with the demo account was that you get no real sense of what your slippage and order fill may be in real life.
I have started trading a real account and have very quickly realised that things are a lot different when trading with real dosh. Especially on the emotional front.
Examples
Getting stopped out of a trade by 1c which then went on the $1 run, never happened in the demo account or prices going through your stop so you get slippage, once again rarely happened in the demo.
Trading breakouts
Demo account fills were a lot better prices than the real life account, which in turn impacts where you place your stop.
You can learn a lot more (IMHO) trading live all you do is trade 200 share lots. By doing this I have limited my losses (and there have been a few) to reasonable amounts. $88 yesterday over 6 trades and $234 today 7 trades (bit of a bad one).
Admitly not great results in fact pretty bad but on a $25,000 account the financial impact is minimal and by analysing my trades afterwards I can see where I went wrong.
You also identify your weaknesses earlier with a live account (one of mine that I never thought I had was "chasing" a share when I have been stopped out, this caused a number of losing trades that I later looked at and thought "why did I trade that")
Anyway just my 2 cents worth
Hope it helps
Andrew C