Hey folks - on topic... I traded the YM today, just to see what it's like these days... Well, liquidity has improved nicely since the new ECBOT architecture came in, and order matching is awesome. The index moves very nice, very volatile, very fast, and is rather inefficient. I.e. the players are seriously lame there... The opportunity windows are open much longer, and much larger, and much more frequent than on DAX, for example. Plus, the tick size is very small, it's now the index future most suitable for day trading in the US with daily ranges of still ~100T. As Mark pointed out quite correctly - it's the best scalping market in the US. Clearly, the advantage of small tick size is larger tick volatility, and less "slippage" in both entries and exits. Another advantage (for a beginner) is the low $ value per tick - only $5. A downside is of course the massive commissions - but let's not even go there. While the low $ value annoyed me in terms of low return and hardly made it worth it (I started getting serious claustrophobia above 10 contracts, which is about equal to 2 DAX), it certainly is a fine issue to learn trading futures on - if not the best of all. I would say for a beginner it's the ideal issue to learn trading on. Forget NQ or worse even - ES - They are both way too efficient, and you lose too much with entries and exits, and give $hit-loads away to arbitrageurs. On YM, you don't have the arbs (not worth it for them), and you don't have ace competition (not worth it for them), so to learn trading futures - 1a choice... Fast, you might want to consider this. Up to 10 cars works beautifully on YM. After that, you can still go for bigger moves, which you probably do anyway, at least in comparison to me. Not to mention you can then migrate to bigger contracts, like DAX. YM is very very similar to DAX in many ways...
One of the things I hate about YM's new system (e-cbot) is that they have no native stops in the system. -Fast
If you don't like YM, then take a serious look at ER2. I think it is going to be bigger than YM in no time at all...