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?

@tardi44 be sure to "smash that like button" 😉 April 17, 2020

I thought I would take after Rob C. and do a 13 month of trading anniversary recap about my trading journey. In this recap I am including the biggest lessons I learned, what I wish I had done differently before going live, and last but not least my recommendations for new traders, at the end I also added a comparison of November 2018 to November 2019. Hopefully, this help you not make the same mistakes I made, or help you prepare to go live. I figure, it will be best to start with recommendations for new traders, so here I go. Recommendations for New Traders 1. Develop a business plan that has a vision, an overview, a trade plan (Robert H. Template is great), objectives, and an action plan with monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. If you would like an example, send me an email and I will send you a copy of the one that I use. 2. Trade every type of strategy until you find what you are good at, and then refine it and come up with a playbook before going live. There is a link in my daily journal on page 13 if you would like an example to build off of. 3. Develop a risk management plan, and then seek someone out that has been trading live to give you constructive advice on it. Take that advice and apply it as you see fit, and remember they probably have some past experience that the advice is built on. 4. Number one in my book is “Respect your Stop.” You are going to be wrong, have hotkey mistakes, and make bad trades. One of my criteria’s for going live was to go 20 straight trading days without violating my stop, because if I could not respect my stop in Sim, then how could I think I would be able to respect it when I was live. I believe this is the reason I have been able to not let a stock go past my stop this year. 5. Last but not least, and I am sure you heard it from a lot of traders, it is a process that will take time, so enjoy the journey as you develop yourself as trader and truly get to know what makes you tick. I know I have. Recap of the last year Personal – The one thing I was not expecting once I began my live journey was how much I would learn about who I was. Andrew and all the other moderators talk about how important psychology is in trading. It is not just the psychology while trading, but also getting to know yourself and understanding why you react the way you do in different situations. It took me a couple of months, but I eventually figured out that I hate to be wrong, because in my profession being wrong can have catastrophic consequences. That is why for the last 23 years I have strived for perfection in everything I do at my job. Now introduce a profession where successful traders are wrong 40% of time and you can see I have a lot to learn. Trading live for the last year has made me a more flexible individual, and is helping me to become a better overall person. Technical – My biggest fear once going live was that I would blow up my account and not be able to continue before I could get through the learning curve; therefore, I decided to take Andrew’s advice and treat this like a business. Prior to going live, I developed a 5-year business plan, and a career plan, trading plan, and metrics to achieve over a year. If any of you kept up with my journal, you saw that I approached the last year through baby steps. I would attempt to master one topic first, then move onto the next. Below was the path I took: Step 1: Risk Management Plan – Failed at this until July 2019. Step 2: Stop Loss Plan – Mastered it in Sim, I say this because I made it a whole year without violating my stop loss (full disclosure: 1 time I couldn’t get out a trade due to platform issues, but I did hit the button to exit). Step 3: Entry Plan – This took me a while to nail down on my Orb strategies but by May I was very happy with it. When I introduced an afternoon strategy it became a huge problem and my equity took a hit, because my entry plan did not work, 25% accuracy when I took it live. Thanks to my risk management plan I was able to survive with minimal losses and have been able to readjust the entry to acceptable win rate of 61%. Step 4: Profit taking – By far this has been the most difficult thing for me to deal with. I refer you back to I hate being wrong. I would be quick to take profits, so I could be right, but then would miss the larger move. If I held on longer; however, meant I would get stopped out more, resulting in the dreaded being wrong situation. I am still working on this but having a solid risk management plan has made it much easier to deal with. Monetary – Well, I know I am not the next great trader, nor have I ever thought I would be. I am perfectly happy being the 3rd string quarterback making minimum wage, so over the last year this has not been much of a focus for me yet. The only monetary thing I really wanted out of this year was not to blow my account up. In the end I accomplished that, so after I get a profit taking plan that works with how I trade, I will look at increasing risk. I know it is crazy trading stocks not to make money, but to develop my trading skills, I think I read that somewhere once. 😊 Biggest Lessons learned 1. I hate to be wrong 2. Thinking in probabilities is a must, and I needed a lot of work in that area. 3. I am really good at executing my stop loss 4. I have sufficient discipline to execute a solid trading plan. 5. My risk management plan I developed in sim was crap and caused me to lose more money than I needed to. 1st Risk Management Plan: November 2018 December 2018 - Took same share size per trade with no consideration for equity amount January 2019 – July 2019 – was risking 3% of my equity per day to make 1% of my equity, yeah makes no sense, right? 2nd Risk Management Plan: I now risk 1% of my equity per day to make 2% of my equity. 6. The more I focus on money the worse I trade. 7. Having a business plan prior to going live gave me a road map to follow when things did not go the way I expected. What I wish I had done before going live There is only one thing I wish I had done before going live. I wish I would have had my risk management plan focused around max loss per day instead of focused around what I needed to risk in order to make X dollars. This was a huge miscalculation on my part and I didn’t figure it out until 9 months into trading, when I started to focus on profit taking and why I couldn’t get my winners to outweigh my losers. Once I realigned my risk management into a correct ratio, I started having bigger winners and smaller losers and my net equity curve finally started to move up. Comparison of November 2018 vs 2019 Item 2018 2019 Total Days Traded 15 12 Total Trades 28 9 Average Trades per day 1.86 .75 Profit/Loss % (2.6%) 1.2% Rule Violations Average per day 3.5 .6 Trades outside Edge 5 1 Net Equity Curve November 2018 Net Equity Curve November 2019 I can't wait to see what the next year of trading brings. Best wishes and safe trading to all.

Hi Andrew, I'm a lifetime member and ever since I joined back in 2018, I've been relying on your recaps to practice and learn from. You see, I work during market hours (EST time). As a result, I can't trade every day nor can I login into the chat room. One day out of the week, when I work from home and depending on my workload, I may login into the chatroom and occasionally trade. Outside that, my only hope has been to practice on Tradingsim almost every night by going through yours and other member's recaps. That in itself is what has given me the confidence to trade. Now that your recaps have been taken out, I've lost a big opportunity to learn and keep up with the group's expertise. You have always said that practice makes perfect and without those recaps to learn from, I may never achieve the goal of being a competent trader. So I humbly request you to reconsider making your recaps available for lifetime members. It doesn't have to be on youtube, maybe under the education section which can only be accessed by lifetime members. It doesn't have to be curated. You can leave out the p/l numbers; merely showing what you traded, the charts and your thoughts, will be a great learning resource for individual like me, who can't trade very often like others. Thanks Yardley

To test ur comfort level i suggest u try the following two things: 1. Convert ur old/new mobile phone to a Stream Deck. Download from App store, install the PC dev tool, create profiles first then install mobile app and connect. Its 30 days free trial, $3.00/mth after. Many Youtube videos to teach you. Buy physical deck after if u like or continue with phone. 2. Invest in multi-function mouse with additional buttons. Logitech has a few. Map hotkey commands to mouse buttons and test. MX 3 series was good to me. 3. Logitech Flow and Options software and/or MS Mouse Without Borders was also helpful when u want seamless screens / mouse / keyboards across multiple windows computers.

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.

April 13, 2020 April 14, 2020

@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...

Hopefully this can give other members an idea on how to structure their own day. Everyone is unique, your prep and plan may look much different than mine. Please check it out, any constructive criticism is welcome Untitled_presentation(2).pdf

Hi Andrew, Being as a member for more a year, I haven't miss one trading show. One thing really amazing me is how you manager your trading size from trade to trade. For example, seems like on one trade your size is 500, another could be 5000. You could lose $200 on the first one but making 3-4k on the second one.. As a new trader, size management is the biggest issue I have. And you are the best of this. The best way to learn is to do what the best do. I want to trade as the proportion of your size like 20% of your size. You said in the chat room that everyone should worry about their own account not others. Yes, I agree. However, managing trading size is the biggest issue for most of new trades. I think it would be huge help for the community if you can show your position size real-time, not the p&l, just the size.

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

So if anyone else if trying to figure out how to get ninja trader working with historical data, let me know here and I'll be happy to help you out if you get stuck. It can be a difficult process....

Stuart, Just read through the thread and started smiling when I got to the most recent posts! YES, you did it right! Believe it or not, BOTH Carlos and I have had to step back at times to small shares when we have bad psychology or on a poor streak and not feeling confident with our trading. For you to take that insight, and go back to small size is SO GREAT. It eliminates all emotions, FOMO, revenge trading. . . .And at the end of the day, even though I know we are all doing this to make money . . . oddly enough money needs to be the last thing on your mind to trade smart. And by going back to small size, it is an easy way for your brain to stop caring about the money. Now the next step is to increase share size and risk very very slowly. In baby steps. Do not increase your risk by 50-100% because you are feeling great and confident and think you have a handle on your emotions. Only increase your shares/risk by 5%-20% per week and go very very slowly. Always be willing to take a step back, but never jump to far ahead. Always remember, this is a marathon not a sprint. The market will always be there, it is only us, the participants that will get exhausted in many different ways and have to step aside. And as you thanked Carlos and I as well as the rest of the team for sharing with all of you, we want to thank all of you for listening! We share to help in any way we can, and it makes us so happy to know that people actually do get helped by our insights! So THANK YOU!!! @Stuart @Carlos M.

Hi, I have been part of the BBT community for more than 1 year (I was part of a different community before). During this time I have been investing in my education, learning more about good set-ups, managing risk, understanding psychology and other aspects of day trading. I have been paper trading for 6 months total with 1-2 months of live trading in between, where I learnt about the importance of psychology is. Aside from paper trading during regular trading hours (I mostly trade in the first hour from the open) I have been using the new replay function in DAS which provides great opportunity for practicing all the major strategies (I wish it had L2 data, though!). My performance is not as impeccable as that of Thor, Brian, Andrew or other seasoned BBT members but it has been improving over time. After reviewing the trades I took in Jan, Feb and March 2020 I though I was finally ready to trade live again. However (probably because of the current market conditions) my performance during the past week and a half has been horrible. I feel as if all of the rules and strategies I have been developing/following do not apply to this market anymore. I wonder if any of you is in a similar situation and if you have any word of advice. At this point I could go live and keep my size as small as possible, or paper trade for another 3 months until market conditions improve....or get worse 🙂 Cheers!