Agreed....ES is not for everyone, patterns do exists but it needs bigger account and very good psychology to trade successfully.
i went from swing trading stocks (did okay, but not great) to daytrading ES about 4 years ago. initially i did very well with ES, but that didn't last more then a month or two if i remember correctly. it took me longer to get the hang of ES then stocks for sure. but think my exclusive focus on ES for several years has allowed me to really get an understanding of it and how to trade it consistently (see my pnl blotters). now, when i occasionally try daytrading stocks again i get mixed results. i know a lot of people have a hard time with ES. when i contemplated the switch from stocks to futures i started a thread (search back to 2005 to find it) i remember someone telling me in my thread something to the effect of, ' ES is a jungle, but trading stocks is like picking up money hidden in the corner'. the ironic thing is that for me although ES is not easy (it is indeed a wild jungle) i find it easier to get a sense of it then i do stocks. I've made money almost every week trading ES for some time. i do have red days here and there, but my weeks almost always end green. i couldn't say that for swing trading stocks. ES is highly manipulated, just like stocks can be. but i've found a style that works for me. i don't take very many trades per day, avg. 2-3 per day. the idea of "scalping" in ES is a suicide mission if you ask me. i use MP (both daily composites and multi-day comps) to get oriented for the longer view, then use price action, vol, internals, and my own version of a T&S for entries and exits. i usually go all in and if i feel like i've caught a decent intraday trend i will stretch out my exits and scale out as i see the market develop. by doing that i've been able to keep my avg. winning trade significantly larger then my avg. loser. one thing that i do have to do, is make adjustments as the overall market changes it's color. for instance, last Oct. - Nov. during the crazy 50-70 point daily ES swings i brought my size way down, widenedmy stops and tended to not scale out...when the market moved significantly in my direction i would bail and close up shop for the day. i recently tried some overnight trading in ES to see what it was like and i was very inconsistent. i realized that i need to see the internals and what the the other indices are doing in order to trade successfully. just one man's experience.
and i forgot the most important part....i believe psych. is very important in trading in general, but even more so in futures, imo. i've spent considerable time and effort working on myself to keep myself centered with daily meditation (most days), working-out, and i eat well. i hate to use cliches....but i feel those things are critical to my success. i didn't do that when i was trading stocks, or at least i didn't work on myself that much.
the ES is easy, but it has to be traded like swing trading. if there is not a potential for 10 points in the next move don't even try. some days no trades.
I scalp futures everyday for a living, but never managed to succeed on stocks...I still take my chance every once in a while but no success so far.
I'm not really sure what the PL thread is, but your post is meaningless. It lacks the most basic logic you can think of --- futures trading is a zero sum game. This obviously means that if some traders are losing then other traders are making money. The more people lose trading futures, the bigger the amount of money made by the fewer people making money. This is basic logic/math. Furthermore, just because you cannot do something you should never assume that no one can. I hear idiots on CNBC all the time claiming that you cannot time the market. Just because they do not have the ability does not mean that no one has the ability. Futures trading is the same. In fact, the people who claim that money cannot be made by timing the market, or in your case by trading futures, are the absolute worst to comment since by default they are losers in the pursuit (if they were making money then they wouldn't claim making money is impossible). I would agree that making money trading futures is much harder than making money trading stocks. But then again the money is much greater in futures.
What if someone doesn't have 45k to trade with? What I meant was if someone wants to "scale down" such that 1 tick = $1, they can't do that with futures. Or, to go with your example, trading futures requires you to have a lot of capital. Not because there's a PDT rule or anything, but because of the "leverage."