Leaderboard

I'm a pretty heavy user of trading sim, and there only seems to be a bit of scattered info on it in the forums so I thought I'd post a detailed thread here along with some recent improvements they've done. For those who don't know, TradingSim (www.tradingsim.com) is a dedicated replay paper trading platform that runs in the browser. One can choose any date, setup a watchlist and playback stock data. There are buttons for play, pause, step to next candle, speed up, slow down etc. You can set your account size, buy, sell, short, limit and stop orders are all there. The advantages of using such a platform: Trade outside of market hours Drastically increase the amount of practice trading for a given time of day (for instance the open) Trade in different market conditions Use it as a research tool to study historical data, refine patterns and strategies, etc. One of the main drawbacks that people have commented here on the forums here is that it does not have pre-market and post market. They have since added this a little while ago. I'd say the only key thing that's still missing is level 2, although they do have order flow; and that also shows the current spread. There is obviously no premarket gapper scanner or anything like that. For trading practice I simply look up the respective recap from Andrew on youtube in order to get a watchlist. I spent quite some effort getting this das-like, and I'm relatively happy with the result. Take a look for yourself, and note that my DAS setup is slightly different than Andrews (I use green candles, different thickness MAs). Like DAS, there are a lot of options, it takes a little while to find everything you need. One rather critical option that vastly improved it for me was the 'Scale series only' under the 'Scale' of the chart settings. This stops the chart zooming out to fit the 50 and 200 SMA when they are out of screen. Just like DAS you can mark your charts with relevant levels from the premaket or daily, levels can be moved across charts via one by one via a copy-paste type functionality, but given the amount of clicking involved it's just as fast to draw them again. Some of the drawbacks the platform still has: Calculation of the VWAP in the pre-market is incorrect (I am currently in contact with them about this) No level 2 Hotkey functionality is a bit weak compared to DAS For active trades, it shows your average price on the chart, as well as relevant limit/stop orders, which is pretty cool, however once a trade is closed, there are no triangles to show you your orders. This makes it difficult for reviewing trades. This also facilitates overtrading or scaling out too quickly in my mind as you can't see the array of triangles you are leaving behind. During my usage of the platform I have found some bugs or oddities and sent them feedback. They have been fairly responsive about addressing all the feedback I have sent them, and a number of things have been fixed thus far. A word to pricing and competition. I tried both NinjaTrader and ThinkorSwin in the beginning, both of which are free. Ninja trader didn't work at all, replay only seemed to work for futures and forex. ThinkorSwim is also free but requires an ameritrade TD account. Based on feedback I heard from others from the community that it was rather clunky and not really usable, I didn't bother trying it out. TradingSim is $300 a year, and they offer a 10 day trial. Compared to the cost of DAS I personally think this is totally reasonable, particularly for people with jobs, or in other time zones who need to practice out of market hours. To conclude I want to emphasize that whilst I am happy with using this software, it is clearly no replacement for the DAS trader simulator with real time data and participating in the chat. Personally, I find I take tradingsim less seriously than the DAS sim, something about the fact the things are not happening real time really takes the pressure off. Therefore it is essential to participate in the market daily to practice in realtime market conditions, and on the platform you will go live with. I'd be interested to here from other members using tradingsim and what they think. Anything to add or any questions?

You can have one hotkey to partial, cancel the current stop, and reset it with remaining position at break even. CXL ALLSYMB;Route=LIMIT;Share=Pos*0.10;Price=Bid-0.05;TIF=DAY+;SELL=Send;ROUTE=STOP;StopType=Market;StopPrice=AvgCost;Share=Pos-share;TIF=GTC;SELL=SEND

Hi everyone, great to be here. I'm new to trading like many of you, and just started investing (far too late in life) early February just before everything tanked and lost almost half of everything overnight, lol. I pretty much laughed it off because I joined the motley fool around the same time and was planning for long term investing anyway. Not to mention, I didn't have much to lose anyway. Just a couple of thousand that I had planned to add 1,000 to each month. Reading their forums I came across someone who said all he was trying to do was increase his account by 1.3% a day, compounding it over time. That comment and YouTube video recommendation led me to another guy who focused on buying stocks for their dividends and some swing trading as a way to build wealth, but it requires you to keep buying stocks. Unfortunately, with everything being shut down now, my income (I drive tow truck), like many others, has tanked to about 50% of what it was, so no new stock purchases for the foreseeable future. So I did some more searching about swing trading and ran across Andrew's day trading book, which I'm finishing up currently. My account on robinhood is now in the positive, thanks to picking some stocks recommended at the MF, and I have actually sold most of it off Thursday and Friday so I can put it aside for day trading. My plan is to learn on the simulator and eventually move that money to a live account. I figured that I really have no idea how long my income will be cut so I may as well spend my time and that small chunk of money trying to grow it as best I can in the mornings before work. With any luck I can go full time in a year or so. Anyway, great to be here and I hope that some day I'll be able to contribute competently to repay what I'm learning now. Edit: sorry for the book, didn't realize I wrote so much.

The Complete Swing Trading Course (Updated 2020) by Wealthy Education

thank you, Valentin! yes, that's all in one note, i have tabs for each setup and a different page for each trade.

@Michael McCausland, YES! Some tickers on some days seem reasonably close to as "fluid" as the real market opening/day, but in my experience (quite a few hours in replay now) most tickers on most days, even the historically high volume favorites aren't terribly realistic. I'm truly grateful for the feature add to DAS, but the data flow needs improvement and of course we still don't have L2 data. Maybe that's a good handicap and would make me better at certain portions of my skill set? Or maybe its truly a hindrance, I haven't quite decided. Either way, would really like to see a near term fix for the time and sales / price action flow to be more fluid. I continue to work on my 5M ORBs and according to my replay performance, I'm horrible compared to live market/real $ (I'm not that great there either, but better than replay ) I attribute it to such poor price action and terrible fills compared to real. YMMV...

Hey Ross, Thanks for posting this. I am new to BBT and am currently test-driving tradingsim after reading your post. It has been been great for practicing and studying price action in the evenings. Like you, I have a busy season at my day job, and I cannot devote time to trading live every day right now. Once I get better at recognizing price action, setups and am trading green in tradingsim, I will move on to the DAS simulator. And wow, there really is no substitute for seeing real-time price action play out. My first trades were so bad it was laughable. I can't imagine jumping into day trading live with real money. I finally had my first "good" trade last night, which was a bottom reversal back to VWAP, squeezing the shorts after i recognized a bullish engulfing candle - woo! Anyway, it is awesome to be able to get past some of the learning curve in the evenings on tradingsim. The only thing that I find difficult is watching multiple stocks being while confined to one monitor and four charts. Lane