I am quite interested trading the ES for the first two hours of opening. Just wanna see anyone here who is active and profitable who can share a bit of thought. Hope to hear you guys soon!
How about instead of being quite interested in ES trading you actually try it and see if your system is profitable.
ES in the first hour is THUNDERDOME. Dealing with Master-Blaster, you better have some skills if you do not want to be a leaf floating down the river during a flood.
Trading the ES is one of the traps on the road to the profitable trading. This market is overcrowded and one of the most complicated in the world, if not the most. All the around-the-market industry (brokers, educators, books) forces the beginner to trade this instrument. The smallish intraday margin (500$ per car) and the pipe dreams like ‘make 2points per day and you will be wealthy because of great liquidity’, and now the MES step in for undercapitalized. My advice is to start the trading career on the other market, less competitive. If you are strictly directed to the US index futures, look at the NQ/MNQ, if you can trade European session look at the Euro Bund, but anyhow firstly became profitable trader of other market(s), not the ES. You must be boxer firstly, and think about champion's arena secondly, otherwise you will be in the knockdown in no time.
My biggest objection to es daytrading is how flat and choppy it is on many days, compared to momentum gap stocks. Grinding for small unpredictable moves seems harder than trading most-active gappers .
Rough, too much election news, hopefully calm down and hold a direction for longer than 2mins. Then the range drops to small for me to trade during chop. Less Fake outs hitting SL needlessly, like NQ why I've switched recently.
I did sort of the same during election week, traded after hours because the volume was there, and actually very smooth. Went to bed about midnight PT, and got up at 9-10 AM to trade the "slow period" which corresponds to lunch time ET. When there are 5 point moves in 5 second bars, then reversals throughout the day in the same bar, I leave the Thunder dome. As Tina Turner sung, "we don't need another hero... Just a life beyond the Thunder dome.." So what do you think Gerry? Still interested?