All the oppurtunity for new traders is in ES. I base this on the fact that not only crazy traders like me, but also sane thinking traders all agree ES is a thing of the past. So just going contrarian on you, when that many people all agree, they are probably all wrong. I don't know how you would do it, but if you try to do it the way we did it it probably won't work. But for somebody whose brain has not yet been polluted and can wade through a ton of negativity, I bet there is an opportunity there for someone who thinks and see's things differently.
now I'm just waiting for the post, "I don't know what you are talking about. I've been trading nothing but ES for the last five years and I'm making a killing."
i agree, the retail folks who start out . since its a zero sum game. someone has to loose to pay the bills for all those HFT trading desks it seems to be a loosing strategy for most. where is the edge.. sadly there is none.. hence trading itself. in the Long run is a big enigma.. there will be folks who will post. " you dont get it ? do you.?
it was just for little guys, all the big money was in the pit, SPY was just coming on. There were what we called slight, but today what they would call huge inefficiencies. There was a very active retail interest in the stock market. All that made ES an easy place to pick up a few ticks.
I quit trading ES in 2007. 2006 was a very hard year for me personally as a scalper. I beat my head against the wall the whole year just to break even. After I had my nervous breakdown (yes, there was a woman involved) I went crazy and just started position trading and got lucky, and that is why I am still solvent today. never really learned anything or figured it out, just got lucky but when they invented globex, you didn't have to be very smart to make an acceptable living. my first year trading ES I made $8.00/hr on a 28k account (thank G-d for the part time job working the night shift at the C store, came in really handy paying the bills during the drawdown) after about a year I put in my two weeks notice, by then $400 a day was normal. I didn't get it everyday, and there still were some bad streaks. But it was easy money other than the fact that I lost about a week off my life expectency for every 1k I made. I haven't lived a good life, but I hope God never punishes me by making me scalp ES again.
It's all relative - some see potential, others will not. The actual market is irrelevant. The amount of volume traded there daily does suggest that there's a few people out there trading it. The ES is very tradable IMO along w/ other markets. Is it 'easy' as the OP stated it once was? Depends on how you look at it. Some might say your method simply stopped working, does not mean the market became impossible to trade. Just means you were unable to trade it.