hammer: Should be all you need, but for zen you'll need a broker account. I'd almost recommend you spend $100 or so for a months worth of IQFeed, this will give you tick data for the last 180 days and 1 minute data for like 2 years for whatever exchange you subscribe too. Zen I believe only gives you 2 weeks worth, which is obviously fine real-time but if you want to do some research you'll need more.

Thanks Art. I will consider the IQFeed suggestion as I plan to do extensive research and testing.

I'm signing up to InteractiveBrokers as I have seen their name around a fair bit.

I'm getting frustrated. Sunday night I find a strategy. I backtest it manually, just mentally trading. Of course it's easy and I find 10+ trades that are profitable and maybe 1 or 2 that are losers that change signals.

Then Monday and Tuesday I try to trade it real time and immediately price isn't going to target and is doing all sorts of weird things. I'd get a short, then a long before the short goes to target, long goes to target, then original short "would have" gone to target so I'm basically get whipsawed around. Maybe that's just what I need to do though.

Today my first trade went to target pretty quickly. Then I didn't take a 2nd long, took a nap, came back, missed the scenerio as explained above, took a short right around 2pm, news came out on the Treasury budget, and price just goes right up and I end up closing out my trade as price was hitting the new highs for like a 5 point loss. I'm only doing demo so it doesn't really affect anything, but I just don't get it.

Maybe it's just variance?

Maybe I should only trade the first couple hours of the day? Volume drops way off in the middle part of the day and really only picks up again around 3pm.
When doing my backtesting the signals were pretty reliable throughout the day, as my signals are based on price action when more pressure comes into the market, meaning someone is out there doing something. The backtested trades came all hours of the day so I figured that I could do it. The person I figured out the concept of the strategy only trades the first couple hours and he might only take 1 trade a day and then he's done by 11-noon.

Today I thought about ending the day on a 2 point profit ($100 before commissions), but as it's just simulation I feel like I should be getting some kind of experience. I mean, $100 fake dollars by 10:30am and then I just sit around the rest of the day? I don't know.

I have a notebook that I constantly write in when I feel a certain way, come up with good points to remember, or make notes on whatever I feel is important.

It's just frustrating to think I really had something and now 2 days of testing in real-time it's just going all over the place.

Anybody have any advice? I'm really thinking about just trading the first couple hours of the day and hopefully get a signal that goes to target. If it doesn't, I guess I can watch it and see what happens. I haven't completely worked out all of the kinks, but I just want this to work so bad. I don't want to feel like I hit another disappointing wall leading to nowhere.

So I am trying to open an interactive brokers account and it says I need to deposit 10k USD minimum to open the account? I only wanted to start off with paper trading. I am confused...

IB requires that you open an account with 10k to even be able to use the paper trader. They also have a 3 month window where you aren't charged some activity fee (I forget what the requirements are). That's a big reason why I haven't tried IB because I don't want to open the account to paper trade and then end up losing that window.

If you are going to trade futures, try www.mirusfutures.com. All you need is name, phone number, and email and you can have the software downloaded and setup within about 15-20 minutes or so. 30 day free trial. They use Ninja Trader and Zen Fire. I've been using it for about a week now.

Sweeet. Downloading and installing now. Thanks dude.

You'll probably see me in your fx thread over the coming days.

Welcome to daytrading! What worked yesterday won't neccessarily work today and what works today may not work tommorrow. Finding something that works more often than not is the key because nothing works all the time. As your experience level increases you will better be able to read market conditions which may or may not better fit your strategy.

The experience you NEED to get from sim trading is strict adherance to your rules and strategies. You should grade your sim trading not by profit but by execution and making the trades and exits that your rules and strategy dictate. Once you can make the trades like a well oiled machine without thinking or second guessing or making impulse trades then you can add up the trades to see how much they would have made.

I'm not in any other threads. The Forex thread is not mine. haha

Also, thanks mrbaseball. You're right.

But like I said, just being on paper now and inexperienced, having a good trade in the first hour of trading, then shutting it down for the rest of the day seems like I'm wasting that time I could be watching the market and seeing what it's doing. If I was on a live account and that's what I did, say making $100/day at the start or 2 contracts = $200 (maybe $300 if scaling) then I could definitely see myself hanging it up and saying I had a successful day. Maybe I should do that now? I don't know. My thought is since I'm paper trading I might as well just take all of the signals and see what happens.

My exit strategy seems like it needs the most work as 5-6 point stops, although are wide enough to let the market run a little bit, seem really wide to the point where I'm sitting in a trade too long after it has definitely shown it's not going to turn back around.

I could also go for the fact that I can reverse the trade when I get a reversed signal, I'm thinking that's most logical. Or just close the trade at the end of the day before the market closes, to go flat at the end of the day. The problem is that my signals are based on 3 bars, and if it goes 2 bars up, 1 bar down, 2 bars up, 1 bar down, all the way to my stop, then I'm not getting the exit signal and it just drifts away to a huge loss.

I tried coding it on the ninja trader strategy wizard, but I can't seem to get it right. It keeps giving me signals all over the place.

There's nothing wrong with making money in the morning and shutting it down, especially in the summer. That tends to be the best time to trade along with the last hour.

You should consider volatility-based stops. Wider stops when the market is volatile, tighter stops when volatility (and profit potential) falls. There are many ways to measure volatility, that would be a good area for research.

Today worked out a lot better.

I was 2 for 2 for +4 points (+$200 before commissions). Avg. time in trades was 13 minutes.

I entered the first trade LONG and after price made a move higher I decided to move the stop. It just so happened that it was 3 ticks away from my entry and price never moved back and it went to target.

My second trade was a SHORT after the FOMC minutes came out and the ES was moving lower. I got in at a perfect price so that my target would be just above the low of the day (incase the market decided to bounce). It popped right through and a little more.

There was another entry earlier in the day that I didn't take because it wasn't "exactly" my setup, but in the back of my mind it was telling me it would have been a good trade. That trade would have went to target. I didn't take it because I wanted to be flat before the FOMC came out.

A fourth trade came up that wasn't exactly my setup either. I looked at the 15min chart since we had a big down move and the market was drifting slightly higher on the 5min. I saw an entry to go SHORT in a 3 tick window (on the 5min). Price hit the high of that 3 tick window and immediately dropped like a rock to where a 2pt target would have been.

I think I'm just going to lock in my +4 for the day and call it a success. I'm still unsure of the stops, but I think I might be able to micromanage it a little better. It turns it into a more discretionary stop so I'm still working on it. I'm also thinking about maybe only taking trades in the direction of the trend, but I'm still not sure yet. My entries are based more on the price making a larger move, which means that at that point of entry there was a reason why it is doing what it's doing. On a range bound day I could easily get bounced off my trades if it looks like an uptrend, but then the market turns and goes lower. For the last two days if I would have only traded in the direction of the trend I probably would have done really well. But then again it makes it discretionary as I could miss some of those counter trend moves that actually work all day. I'm working on a small sample size, but it's possible that Mon and Tues were variance. I'm trying to keep the guesswork out of trading. Sometimes I don't really know how to see a trend just right so that could potentially just be a guess if it's not clear.

I looked into volatility stops based on the ATR. I could see a stop of around 2ATR. It's something to look into.

Oh yeah, just got my book today, which I linked above, Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar by Al Brooks. Pretty excited to start reading it.

Im sort of familiar with two main "stops" strategies for rule based discretion trading that I find most traders Ive met fall into in a very very broad sense:
-Very tight stop, if the trade doesnt go your way quickly it gets you out
-Runaway stop, placed at a point where the trade idea would become invalid if hit

Neither strategy will work well if you are continually hit your hard stop, IMO you need to identify and take losses quickly if things arent going your way. For example I actually hit a hard stop about once a week which is extreme but an example of what I think is close to appropriate.

Also note stops are just market orders when price crosses a certain point. In general, its bad to use market orders, so if your trades are either 'winners or hits stop' you're doing it wrong.

I'm confused. Could you simplify this?

A stop is a market order that executes when price crosses your stop price. A limit order is a trade that goes to the order book and dealers can use to fill if they can find someone to take the other side of the trade.

Market orders are a 'fill at the best price', which may be different by the time the stop is executed.

I was confused by you saying "you're doing it wrong," but maybe I wasn't emphasizing the right part of the sentence.

Right now my entry is based on a limit order. If I get a buy signal, I put a buy limit at where I want to enter. I then have it set so that as soon as I enter it puts in a profit target and a stop loss automatically. I never have to deal with a market order unless I'm planning on getting out before price reaches one of those extremes.

Is this right or wrong? I was going off of someone else who did something similar to what I'm doing, which is where I figured out the strategy.