Best Off-hours Simulator

[[email protected] 0]

Hi- I am a new member of the community and am a ED doc by profession. Due to my job I can’t use the DAS simulator to practice my trading approaches. Can you please tell me what trading simulator provides the most “real” back testing experience after market hours. I want to practice tape reading and the Trading Terminal simulator does not have this capability. Thanks 

[Angela Kuzeva 23]

DAS Replay mode works out of market hours and have T&S. 

[Martin D 29]

As Angela says DAS works out of hours for T&S but doesn't have Level 2, its something people have been saying they're looking at for years but still not here.

There are platforms out there if you want Level 2 as well, I believe Sierra Charts is one you can download it back for a reasonable period of time (which would be called a DOM/Depth of Market in Sierra because it's firstly a futures platform, they look a touch different but they both show the order book), I haven't used it so you'd need to research exactly how far back it goes etc. It's a very popular platform but is extremely customizable so can be very complicated when you're new and would probably have to spend a decent amount of time setting it up, alternatively there's people who sell their setups which isn't too expensive.

Bookmap is a platform a lot of people here are beginning to use, it doesn't have a good replay (you have to have the platform active to record the data yourself or find someone to share you their recorded files for it to be "real") but it's excellent for reading T&S and Level 2 in a visual way. You can download the data for the previous 24hrs and see the T&S and Level 2 but it won't play like a typical replay without the recorded files so it's not ideal. Here is an example of what I mean, the dots reflect net buys (green) or net sells (red), the size of the dot is volume, this is in effect T&S. The colored lines (orange, yellow etc) are the Level 2 orders, again color shows size. The red and green lines are the best bid and ask. This is what you would get without recording (for previous 24hrs) which can zoom in and out to show more detail (2nd shot scrolled in towards the high of day, it can go way down to the milliseconds if you really wanted), you can therefore see your strategies after the fact but not in real time as it's developing (without manually scrolling data across the chart). Any self recorded data would play like a replay anywhere else with this visual. 

Unfortunately no perfect option imo but these are the kind of range of the type of choices you have as far as I'm aware.

[[email protected] 0]

Thanks, Martin. I will check out Sierra and Book map. It’s hard to get valuable practice if you can’t be in your chair during trading hours. Thanks for the help, sir.