I'm curious are there any pro forex traders? I've always traded the SP 500 and everyone says its a hard market. But, it is one that I've always traded. I've never been able to get interested Forex because I haven't any traders I know/respect trading it. What are the pro forex traders doing? Are you guys doing pairs trading? Synthetic combination? Pure price based TA? Events? Also what do most pro day traders are trading? It is hard to say because the vendor liars. SP Futures Crude Bonds Forex or Stocks
Alot of day traders trade anything that is liquid and moves around. Alot of those ETFS are pretty much meant for daytrading. Everything you meantioned seams right. Crude and s&p definitely I know a little about FOREX other then demo. I know you can lever up alot. I know they do all commodities but I don't know first hand.
Regarding forex, many of the pairs are better to be played with futures rather than spot, as in the futures market you dont have to deal with spreads and you have less slipagge. Problem is that you dont have exotic pairs. Of course that forex brokers would never tell you such thing forex also has the issue that thing can happen at any time so many times you will miss a breakout trade or a price you were expecting because it happened during off-desk times, if you can deal with that, then its fine.
regarding most traded futures by daytraders you have: ES, CL, TF, 6E, SI, GC, NQ, and in a second level ZN, ZS, YM, ZB, DX, NG, RB, HG, 6B. If you want to see where daytraders are you should check open interest vs day volume in futures, or day volume / float ratio in stocks.
I trade for my clients, mostly euro, pound and S&P mini futures( price action off of daily and intraday pivot areas) Some of the previous posters are right on about trading euro futures over spot. I love it, and if you find a strategy that works for you then you will love it too. Just be patient, practice, and more practice... ...and don't use alot of margin.
for some time it required several thousands of dollars to open a trading account with futures brokers. when fx brokers came on the scene they had a different business model that included much lower account minimums, 'mini lots', free chart/order entry programs with free realtime data, and demo accounts. a standard lot is for $100,000 of the eurusd, a mini $10,000, and micro lots of $1,000 futures brokers' account minimums eventually came down to $2,000 and earlier this year AMP Global Clearing reduced their minimum to $500 the one outsider is the fx broker Oanda who's always offered account minimums from $1 up and no fixed amount lot size initially fx brokers offered up to 500:1 leverage and while that's still available in the EU and elsewhere, in North America it was decided people couldn't handle that amount and the leverage was lowered to 50:1. a major difference between futures and spot/fx was that overnight vs daytrade fx margin didn't increase, whereas futures daytrading margin increases in order to trade B&H o/n with AMP and some other futures brokers one can trade the 6E contract with $500 while the o/n margin is $4,320.00 : http://www.ampclearing.com/trading_hours.html fx margin on $125,000 at 1.41533 at 50:1 leverage is $3,538.33 daytrade margin as well as the margin to trade B&H o/n: http://fxtrade.oanda.ca/account/margin-calculator my trading experience with Oanda's FXtrade platform is instant fills at the market price not sure if their MetaTrader 4 platform is as fast, isn't with other brokers I've used Oanda's spread used to be a minimum of 0.9 pips on the eurusd but that may have risen some, as well, all fx brokers' spreads widen during news/economic releases as well as during 'fast' markets and can widen in Oanda's case up to 20 pips trading the 6E via AMP's NinjaTrader and the CQG feed is fairly fast, but the Bid/Ask spread is usually 1 or 2 pips for market orders; r/t commissions is under $5.00 there's a difference between the price of the 6E vs fx - 1.4107 vs 1.4134 while side by side chart price formations are virtually identical, futures close for 1 hour at 5pm EST so, bottom line, in North America daytrade futures but in the EU etc daytrade spot since one lot can be traded with only $250 - day and/or o/n - http://www.fxpro.com/ both fx and futures brokers have the same regulators