Sometimes you have to step back from trading and practice with paper trading. Some of you know this but some of you may not, TDAmeritrade has on awesome paper trading system, and they also have ONDEMAND. ONDEMAND lets you replay any stock for a certain amount of months back. This is a perfect way to back test your strategy. You can either keep track of every gainer (like I do) and then replay it after market hours to see if you could have traded it correctly or you can use Yahoo finance to find historical stock data.
Just go on Yahoo finance and type in a former runner that you know of, for example CERU. Then, click on "Historical Data" and find a day where it had unusually high volume, this should be a day where it had a technical breakout or it had some meaningful news. Then, rewind the clock on Thinkorswim "OnDemand", configure your screen to how you would use it during a live trade, and get your practice on!
Do not cheat yourself and look at the chart before you trade it, there is no point in that. Also, be realistic with your position sizing. If you know that your real life buying power is only a couple thousand, don't make trades on "OnDemand" with a postion of 10k, hoping for a 10 cent move , you will only hurt yourself by cheating yourself.
Lastly, keep track of your strategy on paper, or excel or whatever! Hope this helps guys, this way you can trade stocks even on the weekends and holidays.
I've been using the OnDemand paper trading system on ThinkOrSwim and have been very successful with fills. The only time I noticed I have hard time getting filled is when I try to buy a large amount (for fun) with little volume, then it takes a minute.
Or sometimes doesn't fill me at all. If that happens (rarely) if the stock hasn't move up that much, I will rewind the stock that 1 minute or so and attempt to get filled again, if it doesn't work the second time then I just replay another stock.
@bigman I've never had problems with their Paper Trading system, as they have real time data, you need to call them and ask for REAL TIME DATA, they're usually happy to oblige.
@FreddydaFish great tip indeed, when I'm on a loosing streak, I immediately force myself to paper for a while, and I've noticed improvement, it helps me hone in on my STRATEGIES, and helps me train my eyes to see CHART PATTERNS as they're forming.
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