Hello, I will be starting next month as a beginning futures trader at a prop firm. I get to select which products I want to trade as well as the strategies. In my paper trading I have been most successful and interested in the grain contracts (corn,wheat, beans). I am thinking of focusing in these contracts as well as one other group. Some questions I have: I am concerned about the limited trading hours in the grains (9:30-1:15 CST). I feel like this could slow my learning curve. Any thoughts? Would it be smart to trade another group with different hours as a complement? For example, treasuries which start actively trading much earlier (7:00 AM i think)? I understand that spreading is very common with these products but that approach doesn't interest me as much, at least until I deep-dive into the fundamentals and research the strategies and factors sufficiently. Are pure directional plays in this area too volatile/unpredictable for a new trader? I currently use stops and scale out to try and capture a large part of these intra-day movements. Thanks in advance for your advice.
In my humble opinion I believe grains are the hardest markets to day trade. Those morning spikes are killers. As with any other market, put in a few thousand hours of screen time, and you should be able to see specific patterns emerge which will be of value to you, including profiting from the crazy morning volatility. Good luck.
Thanks for the input. I actually like these spikes as i tend to play them for reversals. I much prefer this type of action to the choppy motion I've been seeing in the index futures. I've seen similar patterns in both crude and natural gas.