Ross K

The tradingsim guys got back to me and sent a beta version of the next release. I can confirm they fixed the VWAP in the pre-market bug. The new version has a somewhat different look and feel to the charting functionality. Nevertheless it works pretty much just as it did before. There were also a couple of other minor annoyances I had that also seem to be fixed.

I just got a response from them regarding the VWAP pre-market bug. "Thanks for following up with us again. I apologize that we didn’t have a resolution for you. We are in the middle of replacing our chart engine with a new one. I will keep an eye out for this as we wrap up the transition in the next few weeks." I'll definitely follow up on this and provide updates here if/when it gets fixed.

Doesn't happen until May, but even if it were tomorrow then absolutely, out of necessity. I live in Germany and I have to concentrate on my day job at the moment. The market opens at 3.30pm local time, and I only trade the first 2 hours, so no chance for me to trade live right now. The time will come again when I will be trading live, but not right now. For the time being tradingsim is the only way for me to keep my trading practice up and engaged in the market.

Yeah, this VWAP pre-market bug is really frustrating, because imo it should be a quick fix. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what the problem is, the VWAP is an accumulative average, summing all price and volume throughout the day, meaning it becomes progressively less reactive to price changes throughout the day. DAS resets the VWAP calculation at midnight, whereas tradingsim resets it at 9.30am. This means their VWAP won't respond to premarket changes, as it has the whole previous day 'fighting' against the premarket price action. They asked me to clarify the bug when I emailed them, and I explained all this, and they didn't fix it. This was around about the time I started this thread. I am going to follow back up with them about this.

Sorry @Robert H, you are totally right there. You can't specify shortcuts with specific amounts to buy/sell, nor any other custom commands available in DAS. I was just reading about how they add new features to the platform, they said that they are reluctant to add new features, preferring to limit the options available in order to simplify the user experience. I guess this makes sense for beginners and people coming from various other platforms. However it likely means they won't add something like this. Perhaps only if enough people request it. https://tradingsim.com/feature-tour/new-features/

That's not quite right. You can click on the buttons and it brings up a dialog to re-assign them. I think this is something that they have improved since I started using it. I remember having difficulties getting keybindings with modifiers (shift, ctrl etc) to work properly, however it seems to be working just fine now. Nevertheless, it is running in the browser, so you can to take care that your bindings do not interfere with browser shortcuts or any browser plugins. I got used to using it in the beginning without hotkeys, using the buy/sell buttons on the right, so I just kept using it like that. However I no longer see any reason why you can't closely match your DAS bindings in tradingsim.

If you use the same chart and change the time frame, your levels should be there. However the levels are not linked across different charts You can copy them across individually with ctrl-c ctrl-v, but you can only do one at a time. This is so clunky I found it equally fast to just mark the same level again. You could ask them for this by clicking the provide feedback, or just sending them an email directly.

As Robert answered it does. From comparing the price action movements on the chart as well as the time/sales flow it seems that it doesn't seem to move quite as smoothly as in DAS. DAS seems to be a bit more responsive to price action movements. However as far as I'm concerned it's negligible and doesn't affect my trading decisions. As for the accuracy of the movements I cannot vouch for that, I never compared that. You would need to desktop record some DAS price action and compare to tradersim.

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?