Good post FD. Don't be in a hurry. I sim traded ES for almost 2 years while I traded stocks. I scaled out of my steady stock trades (gap fills, pattern breaks, s/r), and into ES over about a month period. I then cut the cord on stocks and trade ES and eur/usd exclusively. Take your time. Market will be here tomorrow.
This is golden if you use it. I found it on the cbot website years ago when I first started trading YM. Keeps me in check and on the same side of market trend. Over time if you use it enough you will learn to read the divergence and anticipate the cross which allows you to get in before the trend change. Also if you are not careful you will learn bad habits in sim that will haunt you for years once you trade live. The key is to trade it like real money and to learn to detach your emotion from the money. Easier said than done. "One of the setups I use is to initiate online futures trades off the 5-minute charts using a simple crossover moving average buy/sell and short/cover system. The setup is as follows: a 9-period and 18-period simple moving average (SMA), utilizing a bar chart that changes to green during an upside crossover, and changes to red during a downside crossover. Coloring the bars is a canned feature in many charting programs. If you are unfamiliar with this, the following will make it easier. In TradeStation, for example, go to .insert analysis technique and choose .paint bar.. From there choose .moving average crossover.. From inputs I add in the 9 and 18-period moving averages for fast/slow lengths, and type in green for Up Color and leave red as the Down Color." http://www.tradethemarkets.com/public/Online_Futures_Trading_Mini_Dow.cfm
Aaahhh.. the beauty of simplicity... easily complicated by the mouse fondling nutcase... Something I will add to this is NO DATA FITTING!!.. On range days a 9/18 crossover system will lose you money (so you will want to tinker) due to lag so know it's such a day and relax/trade light... tread water on such days unbothered knowing a days like today come.. always will. I am really getting better with the opening range system... Think about it.. you want to capture most of the day... Well most candles create a wick and you want to trade away from the opening wick so in a nutshell any reversals that crossover the open first 20 minutes are key.. Last 3 days have been gems. If there is no wick understand you'll have to pay up and enter the first reversal..
Don't sim trade, trade with real money but a small amount, like 100 shares. You want your stocks to effect the market's supply and demand regardless of how small it is , feel the feeling when price whips on you , feel the pain of your account bleeding loss , loss after loss. without pain you don't remember the trade. without pain there is no gain.
9/18 actually is useful for helping determine if it is a trend or chop day if you pay attention to see if the 2 are running parallel or diverging. I am a contrarian trader and my worst days used to come at blindly fading against the trend and this simple indicator now prevents that especially if you couple it with a r10 rule. I trade best on chop days and do ok on trend but if I am on the wrong side I no longer fight it using 9/18. the 27 th is what I consider a chop day as we stayed in a 7 point range for 6 hours and you could have still used the 9/18. The key is to learn to anticipate the crossover, there are hints that it is turning long before it ever crosses. If you wait for the cross on a chop day you end up chasing the move with a sub optimum entry.
Excellent advice but I still think one should use sim in order to get used to how a platform operates and to test strategies. If it is not profitable in sim, then there is no need to trade it small live. The problem with futures is most people will trade too much leverage. and it really hard to trade small size. I think a beginner should have a max 2% loss of account per day. You have people trying to trade $300 stop losses on a 2,000 account and they wonder why they blow up. Due to ES's reversion to mean, most who try to trade with small stops get whipped out and this destroys people mentally so then they start using large stops on a small account in order to avoid the pain of losing and this causes one bad day to wipe out a week or month of gains.
Trade closed for now for 30 pips of profit while I sleep. Will look at it in morning to see if I want to get back in or not. I guess only issue is that in future I need to determine if I want to scale out of these trades or just do what I did and keep it smaller size and close out fully.
I kind of like these longer term trades where I can just check the charts every 5 hours or so rather than the scalping trades which seem to create more stress by having to sit and baby sit the trade.