And as far as 'losing money' by "rolling"...futures are marked to market each evening after the close. Which means, you still are losing money and a your margin requirement is re-calculated accordingly. If you don't have enough funds to carry a loser each next morning you'll be on margin call and ONCE again, you'll be taken out or required to wire cash or securities. Why? Because u trade on a 2% deposit, but control 100% of the value of the contract. You could be wiped out within a day.
hm... then, scaling in and averaging would be able to be done, since you can continuously hold your open position indefinitely? only, you have to pay some commission fees? geeeeeesh... seems like forex is much better to trade.... no rules.
hm... so, pretend I have $1,000,000 in my account. I buy a full contract. I can hold it as long as I want, right? wouldn't the price need to fall quite a ways for me to get a margin call?
If you have enough money in the account, you can hold it till it goes to $0 as long as you keep rolling.
If rolling a loser worries you, and you're looking for something else to trade, why don't you just trade stocks?
Not exactly...posting full margin, which is not exactly possible, has nothing to do with expiry. All contracts have a life, futures are no exception. Spot-forex and futures each have their pros and cons. Spot-forex u r still paying a $30 commission in the form of a pip spread. Futures can be less expensive. $10 ticks to $31.25 in futures; $10 only in spot-forex. remember, Corn ticks at $12.50
like what bundlemaker? Don't like Grains or something? One only has to do a little research to find people who have made fortunes in all derivatives markets, Corn to Bonds to Francs and even toady in Euros...and I do mean fortunes dude.
You're definitely right! In fact, that is exactly what I had in mind - trade stocks and futures. Actually, it seems that stocks may be a little more fitting for me, since, maneuvering around the futures world seems like a bit of a pain. maybe I could get used to it, but, with my trading system I'm now using, it is really good on forex, so, maybe stocks are closer to forex than futures are, in that, you can simply buy/sell and hold until you want to close the trade. And you don't have to be extremely rich to do so. Commissions on stock trading suck though, they seem to be lower on futures but you don't have to contend with the expirations and delivery dates, you just buy or sell then manipulate the trade with your system. With my micro-cap account size I would go for a stock that is cheap ($5 or under) with high volatility/volume. commissions are non-existent with forex. mistake is to think you have to pay a set spread fee when you open a trade. here is what makes forex so good... let's say you buy 1000 units of EUR/USD. spread is 1 to 1.5 points wide. that is .10 to .15 cents! and you only pay that once, not like a round trip fee. if you open a 10,000 unit trade then your spread fee is $1.00 to $1.50. again, you only pay this once. I think I found a whole new world to waste time in - stocks!!
actually, I can't even trade stocks. with $8 to over $10 per trade commission fees, open and close, that is a LOT more than I am used to paying with forex trades. in fact, I don't have to pay a cent to get in and out of a trade, besides the spread one-way. though, OIL seems to be doable. I think it is only like, $3.50 for a round trip. I'll look into that as an addition to my fx trading. geeeeesh, fellas, sorry to have wasted your time. I will definitely look into futures and stocks in the future when (if) I get more money in my account. take care.... thescalper