What Futures are the best for intraday & trend-following traders? Hi. I'm not sure which futures market I should trade. I'm a technical analyst & trend follower, so I simply use a chart to make intraday decisions. I usually don't keep overnight positions. So the fundamental part doesn't really matter to me. 1) I wonder what market will suit such type of traders best. I think the market should fulfil the following: - has to be very liquid & in high volume (so I can buy/sell as many contracts as I wish, say 50-100) - has to be volatile (but NO sudden volatile, say 100 ticks up/down all of a sudden) - no gaps in intraday trade - very easy for my stop-loss order to be executed (that's why I don't like sudden volatile) - the leverage ratio has to be high (eg I only need to pay $1000 to control $100,000 worth of contract) - there're many chances a day to catch some decent trends. As I'm going to trade full time, I hope I can find a market which can give lots of opportunities to me As the criteria list is just a draft, feel free to comment on it! You may even suggest any other criteria which I might miss it! 2) What futures market will probably suit me best? Thank you.
(1) Foreign Exchange Bucket Shop. (2) Almost none. (3) If you turn down the leverage, some opportunities will come up in the futures. (4) Volatility happens. If you trade enough, you'll find yourself in good and bad situations. Don't get destroyed by one huge loss.
======== Not investment advice but some elites look before they leap on; In alpahbetical order; ER2 ES NQ[CME is scheduled to lower tick size next month] YM
It's best you call your broker or look at their website to see what futures products they offer. Next...come back and post all the futures products they have in this thread. Then someone can tell you whats liquid for you to trade if you don't have time for some odd reason to look at a chart yourself. Another solution is for you to use one of the free delay service to look at the intraday activity and then document it for a few weeks. Even better, plug your broker data feed into a third party application or use their own charts to watch the products in realtime to answer your own questions. Mark (a.k.a. NihabaAshi Japanese Candlestick term
Actually if they can't suit my needs, the best is to make a switch (but not to adapt it). I plan to change brokers. My local broker doesn't satisfy me. I plan to use overseas brokers as they seem to have more advanced facilities and cheaper commissions. Due to the fact that I get no real-time data on hand now, I couldn't be able to examine myself. Also I wish to hear people's opinions/advice as well. Anyway, I list all the available futures: Index futures DJ S&P500 NASDAQ 100 (All have mini & original) SPI200 FTSE 100 DAX MSCI Taiwan SIMEX Nikkei CME Nikkei TOPIX KOSPI Currency GBP Yen Euro Swiss Australian Canadian Metal/Energy Light Crude Oil mini light crude brent crude oil (not sure which oil is the best to trade?) COMEX Gold CBOT Gold Silver Copper Commodity Soybean Soybean oil Soybean meal wheat oats corn Cocoa Coffee Sugar Orange juice Live Cattle Feeder Cattle Lean Hogs Pork Bellies Cotton
Trade YM. Its lots of fun. <img src="http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=1019060"> (link below is same chart)
Im a masochist. The interface is Buttontrader, my frontend for IB. I trade ES primarily but will trade YM when its frontrunning ES, but you have to put up with a lot of wild swings.