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As an aside, perhaps the goal can be better achieved with a platform other than NT? It's a rhetorical question and I don't know enough about other platforms to make an educated opinion.
Platform isn't that important. Focus on developing skills/understanding and becoming profitable first. A losing trader will lose regardless what platform he is using. If you are already consistently profitable, selecting a platform to suit your needs can give you a little more edge or just make things easier. If you are a scalper you will probably need a good DOM, like the Jigsaw/xtrader one (cts aint bad either), if you build systems you will want to be able to program easily whatever it is you want etc. Autospreaders are useful if you trade spreads. If you just trade off price action/charts you should be good with any platform really. etc etc. So if you are just starting out Id recommend just demoing a few and using whatever you like best.
Understanding yourself is just as important as understanding markets.
It's partly about that, too, in my opinion, because with so little money you won't normally be able to use appropriate position-sizes, and that gives anyone a ridiculous additional handicap.
A beginner, on the other hand, has no need to concern himself with size as he shouldn't be trading more than one contract, or a handful of shares, and only then after developing the abovementioned trading plan. Once he's tested his plan in RT every which way and is confident in himself and his tools, then he'll be ready to add size, either through the initial entry or via pyramiding. Otherwise, he'll be marching steadily backward.
If you start with $1000 to trade oil you are leveraged about 40:1.
Using a risk free rate of 1% to justify using that amount of leverage you would need a sharpe ratio of 4.5, Mean annual return of 50%, Std deviation of returns of 10%.
You are so far over kelly betting that even a good system will fail.
It is imperative to put more thought into your amount of leverage than just coming up with a small amount and just wasting it.
In this instance, $1k account vs $2k account is just huge for how much leverage you are using. $4k you are at least out of fantasy land but still using a huge amount of leverage.
A big problem starting out is that when you take a lose on a small account your next trade is even more leveraged.
This is a very interesting question but it mostly depends on the trading style of the trader! It would be probably a self- challenge for the pro trader...