Recently during an argument with my twin brother markets were a 50/50 I had trade a demo account on MT5 with AMPGlobalClearing. Their Nikkei and SP500 futures start you out at $0 no spread nor commission. You can open and close at the same rate and not incur a fee. 1 tick up you profit 1 tick. I trade for 4 hours and got this 90% 500+ trades I could easily make a living. Too good to be true, in real life it would take 3 ticks up to make 1 tick profit, 2 ticks to break even, 0 or 1 tick = 1 loss. Totally altering the prospect. I found Tradovate and was told 1 tick can profit commissionless environment but their sample demo web trader account shows the same thing profit 1 tick you lose. HFT firms make millions of trades per second they don't have to pay millions of spreads or millions of commissions per second or they would go bust in seconds. So how do I get that 1 for 1 equal symmetrical environment to trade? It's impossible for retail right? Robinhood offers commissionless trading Trading212 .. I'm left with skepticism and curiosity maybe someone reading this is smarter than me. Is all lost? Is there a world for this strategy out there? I understand there is no free lunch but damn
The don't make millions of trades per second. And how do they do it? They cheat Learn how , and prosper along with all the many long term winners here on et
I think with retail commissions in futures it would be really hard for 1 tick winners to make it for the lower dollar per tick products like NQ, YM, CL, and even ES most likely. The win rates would have to be enormous. Now in a high tick value where the costs isn’t as high % wise, I’m thinking ZB type tick values, I think their might be a reasonable chance but you would still need a high win rate and would have to really cut losses short. Depending on win rate, 1 tick max losers and prob a fair number of scratches to bring the average loss down below a tick.
HFTs might have lower fees than you do, but there is no way to avoid paying the spread unless you are putting out orders passively waiting to be filled. And if you are putting out passive orders, there is no way to properly simulate that in a paper account.
- No spread ? This depends totally on your trading, not on your broker. Trading with AMP Global means we talk futures, not CFDs or some other bucketshop OTC products. - No commission ? Maybe, you might get such a deal with your broker. But there will still be fees, exchange fee and NFA fee. You cannot get rid of those. Gotta love those SIM/ demo fills. Now lets go and buy a SIM Ferrari cake. Really, fills in SIM/ demo mean very little in general, but especially when we start talking about very shortterm/HFT trading, you can really completly forget about it. You place a limit order in the emini, and after lets say 10 seconds you might still have 400 contracts in front of you in the queue. But in SIM trading on many platforms you might already get a fill in a situation like this. Some even place your limit order on top of the queue as soon as you submit the limit order. These fills and results have NOTHING to do with real life. Robinhood offers free stock trading, not futures.
I have built a few but getting more than one tick and I call them averaging down as my target is 45- 75% BREAKEVEN +1 tick, you basically waiting for the boulder to stop. Being can't trade on floor, you use limits or pay 1-2 ticks and nothing there cept lose for scalping. The big money with very low risk is long term/hedged. Spend years learning to hedge.. But don't expect profits every month, comes in chunks. My biggest losses have come from scalping/day trading. Scalping is much harder than day trading, really wears you down by end of day it feels like a week. But it is ALL difficult, best do like Ninja Trader as demos and triple 10k and three three times and keep good stats. Good luck