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I was about to post the same question- I want to sim trade the ES on live data without putting the money commitment into it first. I was using NinjaTrader until my free demo ran out. Any suggestions?
I use a product called QTrader, it has a relatively low monthly license cost of 40 USD.
To that you need to add the cost of a data feed - If you guys don't work in the financial sector you classify, according to the CME, as "non-professionals", which means that the cost per month of a data feed for the ES would be 5 USD. To have access to all of the CME live data you would pay a capped fee of 15 USD per month.
You would need to open up an account though and deposit real money, even if you don't trade with real money. You can SIM trade until such time you feel ready to experiment with real money. The monthly cost would be deducted from the money you deposited in your account.
I believe NinjaTrader also offers similar deals.
I'm sure there's other options out there which I'm not familiar with.
I also wanted to add.... there is a school of thought that proposes that SIM trading only for a considerable amount of time is a good idea.... there's another school of thought that suggests that too much time spent on simulation can be bad because one can risk developing bad habits that can persist when trading with real money...
Personally I tend to favour the second approach - I spent about 5 months doing SIM trades and then I decided to move live. Moving live can be a trauma, at least initially, because you deal with the emotions of winning and losing real money, which can be tough, especially for beginners.
xplorer- may I ask you how exactly what platform you started sim trading on? And don't worry, and someone who's only been trading for 2 weeks, I'm pretty sure I haven't reached that "too much sim trading" stage yet.
If you're asking how exactly I chose the platform when I started... it was decided for me: I took a training course and they were using QTrader so I stuck with it when I finished the course.
The reasons I stuck with it
Excellent value for money. Lots of tools available (indicators, basic backtesting, alerts, custom formulas and functions) for a low monthly cost
Reasonable live technical support
I'm told that the quality of the CQG data feed (which provides 'tick by tick' data) is among the best out there
Good API interface with Excel
Like all software products, QTrader is not perfect, so there is the occasional minor glitch, but you will probably find those in pretty much any product.
I plan to start trading futures within the next few months and have (pretty much) decided on the platform I want to use (Sierra Charts - it is NOT beginner friendly, but I like it because it's a fast, pretty much fully customizable platform).
What I (as a newb) would recommend is:
1) Going through this great (free) course - Home - The Art and Science of Trading (I personally didn't get into the meditation, but I probably will, eventually )
2) Picking a platform or two to try and doing the free demo.
3) Once you've chosen a platform, decide on a broker (like was mentioned above) - Sim trading's cheap, but it ain't free for long because your gonna have to pay for data, exchange fees and such. (I'm pretty sure I'll go through Infinity Futures, cause they proved the Level 5 Sierra chart for free and they seem to have a good rep).
No real backtesting (but for that you have to pay even with IC)
1 charts at a time
no complex bracket orders
and some nice features
really easy programming (by far the easiest one I've seen, same level of "difficulty" than excel formulas)
very low resources usages
very stable
free with some brokers
good data feed
For NT when I was practicing I have enrolled my wife and my son...so lot of time of paper trading
R.I.P. Olivier Terrier (aka "Okina"), 1969-2016.
Please visit this thread for more information.
Nice one Okina... although I would argue that QTrader offers some basic backtesting... called Signal Evaluator.
By basic backtesting I mean
Gives you decent profit curve tools for signal evaluation
Export that evaluation into Excel
The other limitation that applies to backtesting is that you only have 3 months worth of detailed data... some experienced people on this forum suggest to backtest with 10 years of data, so 3 months is a bit thin...