Paper trading versus live?

I've been papertrading for roughly 9 months and I'm at 80% gain to loss success ratio in my trades. I'm paper trading with a 3k account which I have earmarked for my live account to help me papertrade with a realistic feel for when I transition to live trades.

My main question is how is the live trade platform different than when papertrading besides the obvious I'd be dealing in real money?

Thanks,
Michelle in Orlando

ON a live account you will suffer emotionally if you have to try and sleep on an open loss, even if you system handles losses(drawdowns) of that size. Most MT4 platforms (others?) will requote you. For this reason I trade with scripts that just keep hitting them until I get in or it times out.

Demo systems also have no market hours, so if you are trading something that is not 24*5.5 live you won't notice. Having access to the market 24 hours a day is a lot different to waking up to a huge overnight move (again se slep above).

Lastly, don't expect to make money right away. Putting pressure on yourself to succeed of the bat will kill your confidence when you fail and affect your ability to execute your system as you have to date.

I suggest you go live right now on a broker that supports microlots(0.01 lots) or 10c per pip and get a better feel for it without having to put your whole capital base on the line. I also suggest you only put he minimum account opening balance in there so you don't decide that you are 'ready' after a month of success.

Sometimes when I place a trade my heart beats hard enough for me to hear pounding in my ears. You don't get that on demo!

I went live MBTrading on Friday 9/19 7am long on the NZD/USD at .6767 out friday at roughly 4pm at .6894 for 127 pips, gross profit of 127.00 less 1.82 commission and a "net" profit of 125.18

I found my psychology isn't affected too much in trading since I use proper money management and the wizemen were green..... I just want to know why people say, not to expect to make money right away, I know people that have grown 5k accounts to 500k in a short time and I also know people that have blown 2 or 3 accounts of about 2-3k each, but to me the difference between the 2 scenarios is that if you're following a plan, {written} than you already know that gains and losses occur, even the PROS know this, It's all about acceptable risk in any trade and to trade strategically and not emotionally and strict money management/account allocation. But I do believe that reading books on trading discipline by Mark Douglas are an asset to anyone's trading arsenal.

live, the fill is a little different. Its definitely faster to execute.
ALso, paper is not a tick by tick thing. If your hitting that high of a hit rate , congrats. I think also plan your trade and trade your plan is good but. If you have a loss day more than once. A lot of times people have a tendency to "make up" and not let the trade run. That's my issue. Long term that doesnt work well. I think the mental disipline of manual trading is rough. I had to quit and went to ea.