Trading Futures - Worth It?
Hi all, I have taken up futures trading as a hobby and am surprised to find that I'm actually doing ok.I trade the E-mini S&P and aim to scalp a few points per day. Not trying to brag but most days are in the black and my account is up 50% over the last few months using only 10% of my BP. Also run a short put strategy, but most of my profits come from the quick scalping.I'm sure I don't have an "edge" over the quant funds and super computers but trading small at price extremes with stop losses seems to be working fine for me.Does anyone else actively trade like this? Has it been worth pursuing? Would be happy to connect and learn more. Thanks. Not selling a course, just some guy who trades
Bump, really interested in this.
From the sound of what type of trading you’re doing, these types of up and down volatile markets are the best for this. Try a consistent downward slope… be careful, the storm’s a brewin
/ES is an amazing instrument -- super liquid, volatile, (at the moment), and fairly technical if you're into that. As long as you properly manage risk and aren't fully invested in it (ie using more than 5-10% of your portfolio worth) I don't see why not. I used to trade it a bit but I would aim for 40-60 tick type of setups with a 20-30 tick stop-loss, scalping seemed very asymmetric to me and not sustainable but that's just my view.
Anyone who says short term trading is "competing against algorithms and computers" has quite literally no idea what they're talking about so just ignore them but realize the odds of succeeding as a full on day-trader is extremely small based on retail brokerage reports -- not knocking your success but it's worth mentioning a lot of the game comes down to risk management, sticking to your plan, and a reasonable risk-reward ratio without serious drawdown.
My only advice is have a game-plan every day -- before I would start trading I'd have my chart mapped out and knew what moves I was going to take before I even opened up my broker, the more I deviated from that the more I lost, just have a plan and know when to close your broker for the day.
I know some people who like to scalp 30-Year Treasury Bond Futures (/ZB), it's $31.25 a tick so it is very heavy but also super technical due to how liquid it is, usually 200-300 orders on the ladder. In my experience, I would avoid any type of commodity or metal futures, they're just way too thin of a market.
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