Yeah, I don't even want to touch futures. Why ETFs? Is there a significant difference between trading ETFs and trading stocks? I have SPY as a long term holding right now but it's like ~$125 a share. That's a bit expensive for what I'm looking at to day trade.
I was just saying that if you were thinking of trading ES, trade SPY in small amounts til you start making money. This way you will lose slower while learning. When you feel more confident, upgrade to ES as it is more cost-efficient. I find that I trade individual stocks better than indices. You will just have to figure that out for yourself.
Trading individual stocks, you have significant news risk and higher volatility. Broad-based ETFs (or index futures), because they are averages of many stocks, are more "pure" if you want to trade technically, supply/demand, etc. Beware of narrow-based ETFs that have a few heavily-weighted components (like SMH/TXN/INTC/AMAT and BBH/DNA/AMGN/GILD) - these have more news risk from those heavily-weighted components.
I stick with stocks that trade 2M shares / day, I find that probably 90% of the time you can trade 1000 shares on the inside bid/ask. The other 10% of the fills are bad or terrible ..... like the price may move quickly on just 100 shares of volume and then move right back, and your fill on 1000 shares slips one half or even 1 percent. 5M shares / day is better.
Don't over complicate your trading. Watch DELL and GM. Nasdaq and NYSE. Both have a lot of "thickness" at each price point. DELL will give you a nice run of more than 50 cents most days. Easy to buy and sell with "market" order because of the thickness. Same goes with GM. Both move slow and easy. Great "starter" stocks for you to learn how both markets move and how they execute on each particular stock. Both have fairly defined support and resistance. Both move with indices. Buy 200 shares and start practicing day after day for several weeks. Work yourself up to 3000 shares of DELL and make 50/60 cents for a nice 1500/day income. Simple........ SteveD