FORGET MONOPOLY MONEY

I’ve moved past demo trading. With monopoly money, anyone can be profitable. Demo account trading often does not provide meaningful results, while directly trading futures contracts with personal capital is currently too risky and capital-intensive for me. But how can I test my signals and algorithms and further develop my trading style without financially ruining myself? I mean, I need to forward-test the algorithms in addition to all the research and backtesting. 

Therefore, I trade the systems live in the market daily at the US Open using proprietary-funded accounts to increase emotional pressure. I use the ATAS trading platform, which allows the integration of my algorithms and provides a convenient interface to access the market data (more on that in the algorithm part of my website). Prop trading has proven to be an extremely helpful solution in this context. This model provides access to trading capital but requires successfully completing the qualification phase under strictly limited risk parameters. Proprietary-funded accounts must be built sustainably and managed with rigorous risk management to be retained in the long term. This presents a significant challenge that demands both discipline and consistent action. I'm aiming to fund a prop trading account to ensure the algorithms perform consistently over time, across various market conditions, and even under the influence of human error. In a lot of cases, the system works, but the trade execution suffers due to inaccuracies caused by my own incompetence 🙄 

Below you can see some charts with trades (the black triangles) based on one of the implemented signals (black dot). Obviously, I don’t yet have the confidence to fully maximize the trades. So, I guess I’ll need to keep pushing forward 🤔 But at least I've found something that looks good not only on historical data. I still need to work on myself and on my trust in my abilities and system to further unlock its potential. The most important thing is to always aim for a positive risk-reward ratio so that potential losses don't weigh too heavily.

FAST FORWARD: FOUR MONTHS LATER

Now, in December 2024, after about four months of daily testing and refining—not only my tendency to exit trades too early but also optimizing the algorithm—the following images show how confidence has grown over time. The realized potential has visibly increased. However, I am still lacking an effective method to filter my signals with the desired precision. I’ve managed to gain some reliability by adjusting the parameters, but at the moment, it still depends on my understanding of the current market context to decide whether to enter a trade. Currently, I am trying to take trades only in the current market direction, which has significantly improved the win rate.

At the moment, I don’t have enough time to fully focus on developing additional algorithms and filtering methods, so I will continue to operate with my current approach and scale up the prop account. The account is not fully capitalized yet. There's not much left to complete it, but I’m saving the monthly fee over the Christmas period and will continue next year. The order flow signals, however, are working very reliably and are independent of the market phase. Simply awesome!