Thanks all for the constructive recommendations; I had initially decided to go with Mirus, but b/c I work at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, they required a bit more approvals. I will look into the firms suggested.
Well, to be fair, your OP had no detail in it and taken on face value it did appear to be a very foolish and novice premise with respect to trading outright futures. Thanks for adding the color.
Well even if I did decide to start trading with only a 5k account, if I have done my homework and due diligence, I am certain I can trade one lot at a time and not lose my entire account. If I do, then it won't be the end of the world, and I will stick with what I know best: real estate. But I don't foresee myself losing 5k after I have put in the work/research that I plan to. Being a graduate student at Georgetown University, and an real est investment analyst by day, one thing I am confident in is my ability to ascertain and learn. But thanks for the input nonetheless.
The best of luck to you, and maybe consider starting a journal and let us know how you progress in your endeavors.
Thanks Bone...good suggestion. I will definitely do the journal thing once I decide that I am ready to pull the trigger.
To do sim trading, you probably don't even need to open a live account. Mirus used to give uname/pwd for free demo account a few years back. One difference being the feed would be Zenfire sim feed, which from what I remember used to be pretty close to the live feed.
The most obvious and overlooked advice is this.... Don't start live unless you have a proven, thoroughly tested, accurate, and reliable methodology. Handle 123 says "you need to be profitable 12 out of 15 days before going live" You need to know your method like non other and every nuance of risk that could happen against you. What if a nuke goes off in New York and exchange is limit down or closed for days. Things like that. Every detail needs to be covered in your method. The money is in the gyrations, up down up down up down. Use a ruler ,watch the clock, and figure out what your buy and sell signals are. Your buy and sell signal should happen at the beginning of every significant upswing or downswing if you want to be efficient about staying in the market and taking what it has to offer. Best to you. Have to start somewhere ...everyone has been there.
+1. I have accounts with both of these firms and also at TOS. Both of them (Mirus and Velocity) are good. I like my velocity account a bit better because i like their account management a bit more; and i seem to get slightly better fills than i do on Ninja with Mirus. But both of them are good. One tip: stay away from firms that dont have a ladder though. Its next to impossible to trade futures intraday without a ladder. my 2cents. -gariki
This entire premise of high frequency manual trading, of scalping, of daytrading - the odds are just really daunting these days. Intentionally choosing to compete directly with machine-created turbulence that operates without emotion and in a rules-based realm - on a tic-by-tic basis. The concept that some kid in Boise with a PC, a $5K IB account, and some common TradeStation indicators wants to survive in that timespace occupied by the automatrons... I find that to be naive and a bit depressing. The concept of some guy manually scalping 300 positions per day with a mouse and a keyboard as an effective strategy that endures and holds up over time is incredibly rare. Not impossible, but rare. In that respect, I am afraid that I would agree with EMG about the success rates for retail traders. The notion of someone opening an account with $5K to scalp ES based upon tic data and common variations of standard technical indicators is just nonsensical in this day and time - might have worked swimmingly in the past, but the bots and the algos dominate the domain in today's environment. All of these fresh young faces looking to learn to daytrade with that image which endures circa 1998 tech boom or those silly youtube promotional videos - well, good luck. It is a complete waste. A meatgrinder, a virtual waste dump for broken and naive souls perpetuated by retail brokers and "training" educators and charting package providers. Look at 90 % of the forum material on ET. Every day we see a fresh thread started by some fresh faced kid wanting to learn how to day trade, or scalp, or trade 'price action'. The pity is that some of those naive newbies ultimately would have made excellent traders. You just cannot be common. You must Zig when the everyone else is Zagging - and I am not talking about fading markets. I am speaking strictly about strategy. The last thing you need to be doing in the marketplace is replicating what you perceive to be some sort of "blueprint" defined by others living off your vigorish.