Tony, no problem I know you're trying to help. Everything you typed is correct. I've read a few of your posts and you're always helpful. At the same time, I don't regret for one minute going live with this when I did. That one week taught me infinitely more than I did when I backtested or demo traded. Not to devalue backtesting and demo trading. I still do them. I decided to try live for one week and assess from there. In doing so I made a concerted effort to limit the amount I was willing to lose by way of not risking more than 1% capital, mainly risking less than 1% on my trades. What I found was that no matter how much you read about the psychology of trading, you really don't know until you put some real money down. After that I realized what I needed to do in my demo trading and the general approach I needed to take in trading. I found I was just treating it the way I should from a psychological, discipline and regimented standpoint. I also discovered what I found to be acceptable win rate regardless of the amount of money I was winning.
I'm afraid that had I continued to just backtest for 6 months one of several things would likely have occured: 1) I would go on and accept the win rate I was getting as long as I was making decent fake money. I would then get upset at myself once I went live and realized my demo results weren't satisfactory and felt like I essentially wasted 6 months. 2) I would have demoed the system, not feel satisfied with it, move on to another system, rinse and repeat indefinitely. I decided to give it a shot with limited risk while planning to get out if things didn't go well. That's what I did even though I made 1% profit. The experience has actually helped me look further into other aspects of trading. I've actually researched and now demoing ways to filter the bad trades, something I had no interest in doing when I was demoing and backtesting. Yes, I realize this might be a personality flaw of mine but that's another thing my short live experience brought to light. It taught me a lot about myself.
Once again, I don't take offense to your comments and wouldn't necessarily recommend my approach to others. I just found that I needed to test the waters before moving further. I actually feel better about trading in general now that I've done that than the uncertainty I felt before.
Thanks again. Your comments and candor are always appreciated. A noob like myself definitely wants to learn from a veteran like you.
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