Everybody on here was bitching about not having them so TST gave the people what they wanted. Now you don't like them? LOL. Look, I know you keep harping on these rules, but my theory stands, all the rules in the world or lack there of can't and won't make up for a trader without an edge. It's as simple as that.
They do offer Russell futures for funded traders. http://help.topsteptrader.com/knowl...-funded-trader-can-i-trade-products-that-were
I show you the problem: If one is allowed to Combine forever, that is lots of missed combine fees in their profits. Thus the need for a time restriction. But beside that, having a timeframe makes sense. Otherwise how would you know, when you failed? A trader could be slightly profitable forever but never reaching the profit goal. In short, unlimited time is a BAAAAD idea....
Here's the flaw: "open-ended, no deadline" equals poor capital allocation. Why allocate money to daytraders who only make money in a limited number of cherry-picked days. Twenty trading days is an entire month. How many of those are you going to pass up in a year? One NYC firm that has been mentioned on ET, and in a couple of books, has said the best traders make money on 95% of the days. And you think someone who is going to surrender several months a year should be given money? Maybe you guys are swing traders masquerading as daytraders. Nothing wrong with longer timeframes.
I've gone over all the structural reasons on other threads but the skinny of it is it's THE most efficient market in the world. It's highly liquid, has millions of various derivative products attached to it, and offers no real edge on pricing. It's not a bad product to swing trade for all the reasons I just gave, but think about how much money you have to make simply get scratch on the vig. It's a 1/2 handle round turn per trade. So if you made 10 trades a day you are losing a full 5 handles on the spreads alone! The thing on avg only has usually a 10 handle range sans economic data. You are giving up 50% of the daily range just to play. The ES is the Vegas version of Keno.
when its 100% efficient price wouldn't move. The fact that there are huge intraday swings means that the price has a hard time finding that 100% efficiency zone. There are intraday efficiencies and daily efficiencies and week, monthly... What it implies is the market or market/maker is extrapolation of the smallest spread to the largest in the increasing timeframes. At any given moment you have the bid/ask and extrapolate it out to the daily high/low and weekly high/low monthly high/low, yearly high/low. So the market is making a market at those differentials in those timeframes. the fact that price doesn't stay in one zone too long, implies it isn't efficient and there is a significant edge present, or significant inefficiency present as you increase timeframes.