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I agree, but for me publishing embarrasing results on my journal is enough to shame me into not wanting to trade poorly on SIM.
Yes, Psychologically MONEY can really screw with your head and you won't respect it. That is the #1 reason why traders fail in my opinion. There does have to be a negative impact from doing poorly with SIM.
I rarely touch money these days. It is almost always just sitting in my bank account/trading account and I just don't ever touch it. What is the difference if 10K leaves my account tomorrow or it comes back 3 days from now. No real visible difference.
I always think for a beginning trader, SIM is a good first step and always a good step if you can come back to it later much like I did. To think you are a rock star after SIM is a big mistake!
A great way to learn about the forex market is by designing trading strategies and back-testing them on historical data. You will quickly learn that a lot of what you thought might would work doesn't work in addition you might discover strategies that do work. Manually playing the market is difficult and takes years of training, I suggest you test your trading skills by expressing your strategies in NinjaTrader, MultiChart, TradeStation, IQBroker or even eSignal and back test them. (Fidelity also has a great platform - Wealth Lab).
That is the single biggest problem I see with traders making automated systems. The data they utilize doesn't go back far enough nor do they enter the proper money management.
IQBroker has money management, risk management and position sizing scripts. Their money management lets you transfer cash between your various strategies, their risk management lets you cancel orders that are generated by different trading strategies (I think) and their position sizing (which is what you guys are talking about) lets you.. position size
The really cool thing about this platform is that I can test my trading strategies with various position sizing scripts, thus money management becomes central and easy to use. I really hope that NT8 will have these features otherwise I might have to defect to the new, tiny, IQB camp.
Personally I like back-testing on at least 10 years worth of data, and see stats on at least 500 trades..