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The social interaction thing depends on the person. I'm actually a lot more sociable now, get to spend time with kids (mine ). I think the most important thing to be aware of is how unhealthy trading can be until you are consistently profitable (or blow your account). I remember being a zombie living on 3 hours sleep for days. If I couldn't trade the sessions I wanted I would trade the Asian session (I'm based in UK). So your body clock can get out of wack pretty quickly. You think, because you don't have to get up for a "real" job, it doesn't matter. Simply trade through the night. This can be compounded if you are, by nature, a nocturnal person, rather than an early morning person. If you can still trade profitably whilst tired all the time then you may be lucky to eventually realise that something has to change. Your health will improve and you'll be fresh and ready to trade your chosen session.

Loads of people seem to knock sim trading, but I think it is essential to get everything down as much as possible before going live. Maybe its a mindset thing, but when trading sim in the past I treated it as a live account 100%. If you have thoughts during a bad trade of "I can just reset" or "oh well, a bad trade, never mind" then you are not trading sim properly. sim trading is not just about execution, it should be psychological training as well. Firstly you say that you are ok in sim. Do you mean that your are in profit? that's not entirely relevant. Have you analyzed your performance correctly. Are you are in profit because you've had a few big winners? how many trades have you had? what's your average loss / winner? biggest winner vs biggest loser? risk reward ratio? win rate? what's your sharpe ratio? mae? mfe? etc. Ultimately what is your expectancy number. You must know your number. If you know the answers for all of these. That you know your set ups inside out. That there is no ambiguity when taking a trade. That you review your journal and create actionable items for your strengths and weaknesses. That you are clear of purpose and confident in ability, then perhaps it's a psychological hurdle. You can try and emulate pressure of a live account in sim. I assume you journal. Make your sim trades public. Even now as a full time live trader I tweet what I'm doing throughout my trading session and I use a twitter hash tag to collate all my entries for the day, which I use to journal. You don't have to use twitter, create a thread on a forum and post all your thoughts, trades etc. You can also try and video your trades using something like camtasia. watch them back during post-analysis. You will get many "What was I thinking?!" moments. In early stages this is normal as live trading and hindsight are out of sync due to lack of intuition. Experience helps to make you "see" clearer in real time. Basically you need to find any method that will make you feel accountable, sim or not. I'm not sure 8 months is enough time to become an intuitive trader, which is absolutely necessary to become consistently profitable. Similar to learning how to drive. In the beginning you really have to concentrate to be in control of the steering wheel, indicators, gears, brakes...and then after a few years you can drive somewhere and when you get there you don't really remember the act of driving. You were on auto-pilot. Becoming an intuitive trader is only achieved by putting the hours in, recognizing and correcting your mistakes, enhancing your strengths, increasing humility and reducing ego. The less anxiety you feel, the closer you are to the end goal. Once I went live that was it. I'm not sure I could go ever go back to sim. However I would think that if I ever had to, I would revisit sim with a live trading mindset. No messing around. Not sure if there are any traders on here who have done just that. If so, maybe they could offer on a perspective of how they treated sim first time around, before live trading and then how they viewed sim after trading live. Not sure if what I have offered helps you at all, but good luck!

Time to unsubscribe to this thread. Hope that this isn't the typical nonsense that goes on in most threads at TL.

I trade currency futures and Forex and believe, in some instances, Forex is better than futures. here are my comments to relevant points as they pertain to currencies. 1, 3, 7, 9: These points deal with transaction costs, leverage and minimum funding requirements. My vote for Forex over Futures here is directed at beginners. $12.50 or 1 contract is too much for beginners who open a small account. If you open a 4k account (9) and open a trade with a 10 point stop loss, you stand to lose 3.5% of your equity in 1 trade. I rounded it up to include commissions. So imagine the very real possibility of losing 4 trades in a row, I saw mentioned in one of the comments. Other comments I saw suggest risking 0.5% per trade, which is good advice. Therefore you would need a minimum of 28k with a maximum stop loss of 10 points per trade. Introduce high leverage and you are asking to blow your account. 50:1 is plenty. There are very decent Forex brokers who have virtually no entry requirements and position size can be kept really small until you become certain of purpose and confident in ability. 2. Very true that Forex brokers are not regulated by a central exchange, but the whole "trading against you argument" is the least of your worries. My background is software engineering. I have created software that has compared multiple Forex data feeds to specifically test how brokers might introduce spikes to chase stops or induce slippage. I didn't find any evidence. Even when I trade futures and Forex side by side the price movement is very correlated. I have never, not once, had an issue with slippage via 4 Forex brokers I have used. Your trading will lose you money, not dodgy Forex prices. 4, 19. In futures, trading the DOM, using Market profile and Volume analysis is powerful. These can be emulated on the Forex side, if you know how. If you are a futures trader who trades via charts, then you will not really be making good use of level II data. I developed my own market profile tool for use with Forex. This, in a nutshell, analyses time spent at price. Tick volume analysis on the Forex side measures activity and so you don't see the actual orders, but if you know what you are doing tick volume analysis can be powerful. ADX and/or moving averages can be used to define market state. So unless you are a die hard DOM trader, I don't see the huge advantage that many claim. 10. There is plenty of liquidity in Forex. Again compare the close correlations and it is clear. Actually, I often find Forex to be more liquid. 11. This one is UK specific. If you trade Forex through a spread betting firm then you don't pay capital gains tax full stop. In the UK, spread betting falls under the gambling act and so is not subject to tax. This combined with the London session being so active is what makes traders from other nations jealous of UK traders. If Forex trading was taxed that would mean that you would be able to offset your losses. So until the majority of traders start winning more than they lose, profitable traders will be fine. 12, 16. There is sufficient correlation and anti-correlation in Forex to supply you with plenty of opportunity. Understanding currency price and commodity price correlation enables you to be even more tuned into discovering opportunities. Could expand on this topic a lot more, but that would take me off topic... 13. Safety of funds is something you need to be aware of in Forex. Always go with an FSA regulated broker, preferably a public company with a long history. Forget segregated funds. It doesn't happen. If your broker is FSA regulated you are insured up to 50k. This should suit most retail traders. If you do want to trade a large account you can get your broker to open a proxy account where the funds are stored in your own account but the broker accesses funds required for trading. No risk at all. 14, 18. This is not true of Forex. There are always plenty of opportunities. The Market Makers Model applies to all Markets. Accumulation (the range), manipulation (the fake out) and release (the break out) 17. Volatility is good. I make money because of it. Hopefully my comments are helpful and I wish you all happy trading twitter: @shawnbarrett