Firewalker's Journey: A path of discovery in search for enlightenment

And how much money have you lost so far?

Don't really see the relevance in posting that on a public forum.
For some the amount will look a lot, for others it would be sustainable. For me, it was without the limits of tolerable and more than I could afford to lose. I'm not talking about thousands, no it's more, much more. Anyway, this is not my main concern for the moment as I abandoned the quest for gaining it back. Now, all I want to do is learn how to trade.

Yes, I should never have started trading realtime in the first place.
Yes, I was a stupid thing to do.
Yes, I let emotions take control over me.
and so on...

I suppose you're trying to tell me get a decent data provider... Esignal or the likes?

What I'm suggesting is that you've been penny wise and pound foolish. While trying to save money, you've been trading without a setup, you haven't done any testing, you haven't developed a trading plan. This route has wound up costing you far more than you would have spent on access to historical intraday FDAX charts. Even so, when I ask why you haven't done the backtesting, you respond that your broker has no backfill and you don't have a free data provider.

If you want to be a winning trader, you at the very least have to do what winning traders do, and that, at a minimum, means putting together a trading plan, and putting together a trading plan requires, at a minimum, access to historical charts. If you want to collect these charts day by day for a year or more for "free", that's up to you. But if you want to get on with it, I suggest you subscribe to Sierra Charts, which costs less than $20/mo and which can use IB as a free datafeed, if you have an account with IB. If you don't have an account with IB, I suggest you get one.

Db

Thanks for the advice, I'll look into it. Btw I have an IB account.

I have done backtesting on ER2 using Trademaven though, you don't say anything about that? Or are you suggesting I have to develop a totally different strategy for both markets because I'd like to trade DAX in the mornings and ER2 in the afternoon/evening (local time).

In order to answer your question, I'd have to know what your backtesting consists of and what the results are.

Db

Backtesting consisted of replaying the day with fast forward. "Results" if you can call them that were:

Most of the time I didn't find usefuls setups, as seems to be the case here again. When I did found one either my stop was triggered or the trade never reached my target before turning back to breakeven. Of course there were succesful ones also, but you could count them on one hand.

Have to admit that testing wasn't as rigorous as you probably would like to see. But my question remains: if I were to test my plan on ER2 or any other for that matter, is there any reason so suspect it could have a different result depending on each market? Some say yes, because every market is different in it's own way. Others say no, because the basic principles that have existed before, still do, regardless of the time frame, market, instrument,...

FW, what I would like to see is of no importance whatsoever. What is important is whatever puts you into the black.

If you've read the threads below on trading plans and trading journals, plus the posts in the PV and S/R threads, and you think that backtesting consists of "replaying the day with fast forward", then I have to cry Uncle.

Best of luck to you in your trading.

Db

No, that's not what I think now backtesting should consist of. I was just stating what I did at that particular time... Although I do think that replaying the day can be of use instead of just looking at old charts? (with fast forward I didn't mean skipping through the day, but playing "as-if" in real time but 3 times as fast, not 100 if tha'ts what you thought I meant).