Can the e-mini be used to swing trade the SP500? I would like to take advantage of the 60/40 tax rule. How do you make a futures contract (which of course expires) into something that behaves more like a fund (SPY)?
Not sure what you mean by 'swing trade' -- but why not? It's just another trading vehicle to give you broad market exposure or hedging.
rickf, I was talking about trades that you'd hold overnight for a few days to a week or so. My question was, how do you keep a contract from expiring. SPY doesn't expire.
Yeah. Just roll it over to the new expiration date. e.g. if you long: sell Mar 09, buy Jun 09 immediately. As long as you have enough margin in your account, you can keep rolling indefinitely. The day-trade margin and overnight margin are a bit different for futures (day-trade: lower, overnight: higher). So... check with your broker.
Thank you very much! Btw, IB has contracts for ES, YM and SPX. I thought there were only 2 (YM and ES) futures contracts that track the SP500. What is the SPX?
I thought the symbol was SP, and SPX was the actual index, but regardless, there's a big contract and a mini one. The big one is 5x the value of the mini one (mini is $12.50 per tick, big one is $50, tick is $.25 on the value of the S&P 500). The YM is the Dow, NQ is the Nasdaq 100, there's also TF (different exchange, though), it's the Russell 2000.
SPX is the Cash S&P index. Check out the CME group site for all kinds of good tutorials. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/
To clarify: http://www.tradingconceptsinc.com/eminitrading/what_are_emini_futures.shtml SP is the full S&P 500 futures. ES is the e-mini S&P 500 futures.