Newbie Here

Hello,

I'm looking for a site where I can "paper trade" the S&P 500 and see if I can have some success, before I put out any $$$$$. I don't mind paying for the service, but I'd like to have it in "real time."

Thanks much!

Yea Pips I agree its really hard to get started... Lots of heart ache and pain. Lots of courses out there and even more indicators,systems, time frames, Gurus, ya da ya da ya da. I agree monitor time is priceless but even more important is a good mentor, yea, the old fashion kind that does it to help you and not for the money.

Hard to find? Extremely. But it will cut the learning curb tremendously. Maybe you can help out the Newbie, you seem like a knowledgable chap, if not contriversial. :)

A good place to start IMHO is http://www.woodiescciclub.com/start.htm
Decent people there and guess what? It's free. Hope it helps.
The Printer

I agree on the mentor idea.... helps to see in real life how someone actually makes money trading index futures. The notion that a qualified mentor will/should do this for free is wishful thinking.

Woodies CCI club will give you a sense of belonging, the good feeling of being part of a crowd of like minded folks sharing a common interest... school of fish / safety in numbers. Unfortunately, in terms of actually learning to trade profitably it is highly unlikely you will have that experience. I have met many traders who have come through the Woodies CCI club experience including room moderators/mentors, and yet have I met one trader that has traded successfully with Woodies methods.

Well,as only one individual and not from a second hand perspective. I can say that, I am making money trading with Woodie. Wishful thinking? Hardly it is right there in front of you and yes it is FREE. Why be pessimistic? Especially if you have not check it out personally. Is the glass half full or empty?
The printer.

The last time I was in Woodie's room (a few years ago) it was running on HotComm and the HotComm client was not free. Has he moved to another platform?

quote:

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Originally posted by Printer

Well,as only one individual and not from a second hand perspective. I can say that, I am making money trading with Woodie. Wishful thinking? Hardly it is right there in front of you and yes it is FREE. Why be pessimistic? Especially if you have not check it out personally. Is the glass half full or empty?
The printer.

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One might consider this a nuance but there is a subtle difference between being skeptical and being pessimistic. So for sake of clarification, I am highly skeptical of any trading performance claims made by Ken Wood or those of his students who use his trading methods.

quote:

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Originally posted by Printer

Well,as only one individual and not from a second hand perspective. I can say that, I am making money trading with Woodie. Wishful thinking? Hardly it is right there in front of you and yes it is FREE. Why be pessimistic? Especially if you have not check it out personally. Is the glass half full or empty?
The printer.

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Printer, if you're making money trading his system then I'm sure that a lot of traders reading this would really appreciate it if you talked them through how you take his setups and which symbols you trade. If you want to post some charts and have trouble capturing them and uploading them then let me know and I'll talk you through it.

Even simpler, they post all the trades taken everyday at there site. And yes I am there trading them in real time. They call the trades in advance and yes they post all the trades...winners and losers. All the charts are there as well so no need to double entry, Just visit the site. The room is free and so is all the info.woodiescciclub.com

I know, hard to believe its free, been trading the new range bars introduced in November in Vegas stats are impressive. Can't hurt to investigate.
The Printer

Well it has been a couple of years since I took a look at the woodies cci web-site. It has certainly grown into quite the commercial endeavor that short period of time. I see Mr. Wood has dumped IB and Sierra in favor of PFG and eSignal. Also got a chuckle from the newly released $900 "Traders helping Traders" 6 DVD collection of Mr. Wood explaining how to trade the CCI indicator....

Anyways the point of this posting is to explore the trading performance claims Mr. Wood makes on his home page...

Monthly Performance Statistics for January 2008
Russell 2000 Index E-mini ER2

Total number of trades = 257

Percent Profitable = 70 %

Net Profit = $ 13,702

I was unclear if this was for the most recent month or some other month... He posts a similar trading results statement for the Gold futures market as well (claiming a net profit $ 10,368 in one month).

Assuming a margin of $2000 on the ER2 E-Mini contract, we can calculate that Mr. Wood claims on his home page he achieved an extraordinary 585 % profit in one month of trading using the CCI indicator.

Anyone here buying that claim ?

edit - re-read the statistics report, it covers all ER2 trades for January 2008.

Looks like I'm rubbing off on you guys :-)

Hi,

First off, I'm a newbie here.

Since this post regarded "paper trading", I was curious as to how well strategies developed from paper trading translate into "real trading".

And I know this was touched on before, but how long should one practice (assuming one has become proficient in chart-reading) using what looks like a profitable strategy with paper trading before taking the dive into doing the real thing.

Many thanks in advance.

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Originally posted by dt_wannabe

Thank you for the advice pt_emini.

I started out with IB's demo program (which supposedly uses last week's market data) to now paper trading real time with Ninja Trader w/ a Zen Fire feed.

Since my strategy (so far) has been scalping for 1 pt on the ES, I guess my next question is this: how do the paper-trading fills compare with real-trading fills?

I've read that this is an issue (i.e. its much easier to get an order in when your paper-trading than it is with real-trading).

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With the Ninja simulator the ES fills are very conservative. Thus your live trades should be able to replicate your fills with reasonable correlation to your simulator results. I agree with DT's comment that the simulator is conservative and you may find fills a touch easier than the Ninja simulator is giving you presently.