I would suggest you stop entertaining others' ideas for now, and just go with your system live as you have it in your head. You have your track record from the CME contest, so implement, and see how you do!
Thanks for the thoughtful post. Indeed the market is highly volatile right now. And I may need to scale to 1% or 1/2% or just "2 ticks" average per day! But at least now with the Micros, I now have a tool in my tool box I didn't have before. I agree with you that the emotional side of trading is much larger than us rational types are prepared for. And we have to be careful. Knowing I am not alone in my frustration with the market I want to share my journey. Hopefully I will have some good results to share in the next weeks and months.
Looking forward to watching your Journal. I'm waiting for the volume to pick up in the MGC contract. The MNQ has plenty of volume already. Good luck!
The CME challenge felt like a fun crazy free-for-all. It was 24 hours a day for 5 days. And there was lots of volatility that week. The contest did not foster safe trading principals at all (and I told the CME as much afterwards!), but created a frenzy. There were no commissions and no limits on the number of trades. It was all about identifying big market shifts and holding on to winners for the duration of the move. I was in the top 10 most of the time, but flamed out on the last day. We were able to trade up to 10 micros each of MES, MNQ, MYM, and M2k. It was a good experience and I did lots of scaling in and out. It was a blast, but I was really tired near the end.
I was being mostly facetious. I plan on doing what I do, especially now that I have advertised it to the world. But I do keep 5% of my mind open to new ideas, so I wanted to give myself a chance to try on a potentially new golden nugget of wisdom.
Indeed the epiphany for me came when I realized with the micros I can add contracts one at a time and scale up gradually. I will post my official rules, but I will probably add 1 micro with each additional $500 in the account balance. $1500 would then allow me to trade with 3 micros. If I keep looking at a % growth and keep things reasonable and not try to swing for the fences, then I should succeed.
Thanks for the interest. I agree that MGC certainly needs more volume to really be tradable. And I heard there are some pretty vocal bodies try to get an MCL created. That would be nice....
fwiw..spent last few months testing various AMP platforms for MES trading..decided to go with AMP Global EU..they only offer MT5..but with Stereotrader it is fine what software are you using with AMP..what is your strategy ( one liner will do)..what time/s can you trade..how many monitors do you have..have you a papertrading account set up..can you trade another account (for micros) with a different broker using your MT5 account keep in mind the only big difference to trading the ES is that you are risking more ticks per contract..at the end of the day you still need to know exactly what you are doing and have a sound strategy to achieve consistent profitability with a given no. of trades!!