BrianD Legend  Posts: 302 Joined: 2/23/2013 Location: Grand Rapids, MI  User Profile | Cannot reasonably address your 'how long' question. Just wanted to point out issues in paper trading (BTW might want to consider www.omnivestors.com tools for some other performance review metrics for future performance...). Regarding paper trading, my experience with a brokerage account (in my case IB), may not be representative of actual, live (your money) trades. Two major issues I've found: - Paper trades have a lot of slippage. However, I found "live", real (my) money trading compared to OV 'Simulation' trade values were very close. I once spoke to IB on this, but did not get any solace from IB support. Just be careful with broker's paper accounts - possibly not a valid representation of actual performance. Maybe someone else on the Forum has a more educated viewpoint. I also doubt other brokerages paper accounts are better than IB BTW, you can see some discussions on slippage experiences between live and "OV Simulated" tracking in the forum. - Dependent on what you are trading, (i.e. low volume/liquidity, shorting, different Brokers, etc.) real (your money) results will be different from simulation and/or paper results. For instance, if there is an obscure Symbol in your list/results, it may not be short-able, at all, or by your broker. Bid-Ask spread can be big on obscure and/or low volume symbols too. Most likely, you will not 'experience' this in 'paper trade' mode (I tend to favor high, min volume values in the Account settings because of this). Now, with 'Eeyore' comments out of the way, if you are speaking of OV paper trading, I do believe if you set an Account (being cognizant of potential pitfalls in real money trading) to "Trade=Yes" and watch the results from the "View Trades" web page, you will get a VERY reasonable composite of your Account performance - probably better than a paper trading with a broker. | |
