I see volume of 2,283,428 for ES last friday. If I then assume that arbitrage algos, HFT algos, and regular algos account for 90% of that volume, that leaves me with volume of 228,243 to be potentially attributed to retail traders. If I then assume that 90% of this volume is retail daytraders and not retail swing traders, and each retail daytrader makes two round trip daytrades, then this implies only 102,709 retail daytraders from the daily volume. This figure seems small given this figure is not for the U.S. but for the entire world.
There is NQ and YM and RTY as well. There is also MES, MNQ which have monster volume. Small retail index futures day traders, anyone with an account less than 25K, is likely trading MES or MNQ.
That I would be curious about. Because you have futures brokerages offering $500 daytrading margin for ES and $1000 daytrading margin for NQ. I wonder if there are other small daytraders like me who trade one full mini with under $5,000 of capital.
You can only tade ES with a $5000 account if you are scalping ticks or trading for a few points. If you risk 10 ES points on a trade, that is $500 dollars risk, which is a bit on the high side for a $5000 account. Also if you want to scale into positions, rather than going all in one go. Then MES is more scalable that ES for smaller accounts.
Very good traders trade size. On ES futures you can daytrade up to 10000 contracts. So might be 20 such large traders across the globe. The rest is divided among the true retail then. I do not know how you can daytrade with such size profitably (almost) every day, as you need to have lower risk, otherwise trading that size does not make sense. But maybe they have some extra info to execution or front desks at large investment banks. But I do not wanna say they are just frontrunning other big (banks) clients.
Hello Coin Flip, The ES futures market is for the masters of the traders. You have to be very serious in this ES futures market.