Foolproof way to ensure strategy is on Sim and not Live
Last night, I was testing a strategy to run on the simulation and left it to run overnight. However, in the morning I was shocked to find out that my strategy was running on my live account and it has made a huge loss of over USD2.3k, which is more than half of my account size.
This is not the first time I have left my strategy to run overnight on the simulation but this is the first time this has occured to me. This is very frustrating for me as I'm unsure if the strategy changed to live by itself or that I did not select the right account during the testing of the strategy. Normally it would be on SIM by default and I have never tested any strategy on live account before. Now this happened and almost blew my account up.
Since I began trading, I've always only traded live manually and just started to look into automated strategy. I never let a loss run more than USD200 but this is like more than 10x the normally acceptable loss.
I am looking for some advise, is there a foolproof way to prevent this from reoccuring such as to have a password turned on when the trading is switched to live or something similar? Or maybe to have a standalone ninjatrader program for the main purpose of testing on the Sim account only and the full version only for a live account.
Sorry for the long rant guys but this loss really caused a huge shock to me. The only benefit was the shock alleviate my need to reach for the coffee pot in the morning. Was hoping this was a bad nightmare and everything would turn to good when my alarm clock goes off. But reality struck me when I received the statement with the super big hole in my account.
This is not the first time I have left my strategy to run overnight on the simulation but this is the first time this has occured to me. This is very frustrating for me as I'm unsure if the strategy changed to live by itself or that I did not select the right account during the testing of the strategy. Normally it would be on SIM by default and I have never tested any strategy on live account before. Now this happened and almost blew my account up.
Since I began trading, I've always only traded live manually and just started to look into automated strategy. I never let a loss run more than USD200 but this is like more than 10x the normally acceptable loss.
I am looking for some advise, is there a foolproof way to prevent this from reoccuring such as to have a password turned on when the trading is switched to live or something similar? Or maybe to have a standalone ninjatrader program for the main purpose of testing on the Sim account only and the full version only for a live account.
Sorry for the long rant guys but this loss really caused a huge shock to me. The only benefit was the shock alleviate my need to reach for the coffee pot in the morning. Was hoping this was a bad nightmare and everything would turn to good when my alarm clock goes off. But reality struck me when I received the statement with the super big hole in my account.
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