I think you are answering your own questions...... If trading ES was an easy endeavour....the market would crush the opportunity for free money... What you are thinking about doing is the equivalent of moving from paper trading into live trading. When you scale up your capital size you start to impact the market....those times when you squeeze out of a trade with one contract will hurt when you are unable to get all of your position out of a trade. Dont listen to someone saying google is too expensive....hit it with less shares but it runs so profits can be made...... Stocks to watch.....Everyone will find something different and make wildly different money on the same stocks. I trade commodity stocks....nice solid support when commodities move... Gold stocks (anything listed on the XAU) Metal stocks....AL, N. I was trading semiconductors like AMD for the last few weeks as news stories drive AMD past INTC. Keep your eyes out for where the volume is and be around the volume. If you are trading the NYSE....find a core group of stocks and learn to trade those....I have about 10 base stocks....The specialists trade their stocks differently so you have to learn how they think and how they match orders and under what situations they rely on autoex and what the best way to get short etc...etc.... Each stock has its own games that can be learned and exploited. Hope some of this helps
mcelitetrader: Thanks for your input. So you don't trade the same stocks every day? do you keep swithing every few weeks? every quarter? based on news? do you use filters like first alert? or insight? do you simply read the print or do you use charts and other indicators? What I am trying to get at is this: what looks like it is too easy on a 1 minute chart may be not too easy when trading live? right?? For e.g. if i see a hanging man or a spike in that 1 minute bar, how valid is that? I am sure every day trader out there is seeing the same thing that I am seeing? Is there any indicator on indicators? Is there a way to measure or see how good that moving average or MACD or Dinapoli MACD is?? If so, can any one share some insights? I hope to hear from all. Thanks.