jarelj

Just to follow up on this for any future sim-to-live convertees who might read this, now that I've "gone live", yes the fills on the Live system do not match those of the Sim system (at least on Open E Cry). As Cruiser indicated, if you practice a scalping strategy in Sim and it looks like it's too good to be true, guess what, it's too good to be true! Trying to scalp 2 ticks from the Live system is like tearing up dollar bills and throwing them out the window. Put in a limit order and watch the price bounce off your limit 10 times without filling, and once in a while it will actually hit, or if the price moves one tick past then your limit will hit. I had to try it a little bit anyway, but didn't take long to see that yes, it's too good to be true that orders would be filled as quick as the Sim system. So now I've spent a couple of weeks in the trenches learning the hard way what is a trend and what is "noise", analyzing charts, evaluating support and resistance and trading ranges, winning some, losing some, trying to make the winners outweight the losers. Another couple of years and I might actually know what I'm doing!

I did contact OEC and they said that their demo system does mimic "live" fill times as much as possible by staging the orders in a que to be filled, rather than just triggering on a price being hit like some other demo systems. But they said it still wasn't a completely true representation of what the actual live fills would be. I've been trading on paper for a couple of weeks now and doing well with it, so just trying to make sure I know what I'm in for when I go live with it.

What should one expect for differences in order execution times in a "Live" trading environment vs. the "Paper" trading environment? I've been practice trading the ES on the OEC Trader software for a couple of weeks now and working on my strategy. I'm curious what others have experienced on this platform or others on the execution of orders in the live system. I'm assuming that fills won't happen as fast, or rather some orders that are getting filled at a price on the paper system may not actually be filled at that price on the live system? I'd like to know what to expect before going live with real money, how big of a difference is there?