Hi all, New to futures and am setting what I hope is a reasonable goal of 1-2 points a day. I'm looking into TICK strategies, Pivots and A/D. Would love some feedback on what might be useful in my goal. BTW, I would like to automate this since I work fulltime and cannot be watching each tick during the day. Ideally, something like put a limit buy near S1 or some area of confluence with and have a conditional sell 1-2 points away. Please let me know if you guys think this cannot be done. It seems reasonable to me, but I would like your opinions
Remember it is your money that you will put on the line. At least get some data to analyze. Without the understanding of what you are going to do, even with a winning strategy you will not be able to do it with confidence if drawdown hits.
Well, it is not reasonable for a newbie and there actually is a huge difference between 1 and 2 ES per day. The difference is exactly 100%.... If you were talking about YM, you could say 1-2 points, the difference isn't so big. What I am saying is that you should have a reasonable goal. For a start at least breaking even (not blowing up) sounds good. Please realize that one can make a living by making 1 ES per day consistently.
Hi Esnewbie, I am surprises that you haven't been eaten up alive yet with a post like this. Yes, it is possible to average 2 ES points, but extremely difficult. I have never heard of anyone doing it successfully with fully automated system. I suggest that you forget about automation for now. If you have full time job, learn how to trade on European or Asian market. That will either require you to get up really early(Eurex) early or stay up late (Hong Kong or Singapore exchange). There are no short cuts in this great game. Regards, redduke
This subject has been analyzed in the past here, and the common perception that it is "reasonable" to net 1 ES point a day shown to be very unrealistic. Let's say you trade one lots on the ES with a $10k account. I know that seems ridiculously conservative to most of you, since many of you seem to think that if you are not using the max margin the broker will give you, you are just wasting your time. One ES point a day for 200 trading days is $10,000, or 100% return. While I fully appreciate the average trader here makes several times that, yeah right, if you can consistently produce 100% returns Wall Street will bow at your feet, beautiful women will throw themselves at you and Donald Trump will invite you over to his place to play golf. Good luck with that.
1 pt/day @ $50 per point x 250 days/year = 12500 12500/75000 (face value of 1 ES) = 16.67% So, if you can average 2 pts per day (33.3%/year), that's fine work*. *The last time I checked audited track records, averaging 30% per year unleveraged for 10 years would be in the top 0.1%
(prefacing this with disclosure that I'm not making this kind of money...) Nevertheless. If you look at the avg. HI/LO of the day and consider all the traverses price makes within that range, then you are looking at an insane amount of money available every day all day (excluding the time that volume is low and price is relatively steady.) Looking at the fact of what the market is offering makes shooting for 1-2 pts a day avg. somewhere LESS than meeting the mark. The question then becomes, "if there is all this money constantly availble, then how do I get my hands on it?" Notice the question is something OTHER than your original. have fun exploring for the answer to the important questions...and avoid finding the answers to unimportant questions. That is the mark of wisdom.