I cut my teeth some decades ago with YM. It holds a special place in my trading psyche. The granular YM tick (1t = 1pt) imo, offers a great opportunity to hone skills. I have luv/hate periods regarding the exactness. In any case, the exactness is unlike the other US index products which move in fractions of a point, and are not equivalent to the movement increments of the underlying cash index. As you know, my methods are volume-centric. In the case of futures, volume is centralized, therefore as long as sufficient volume exists in the trading time-frame, my methods are applicable. What is "sufficient"? That leads to a mention of volatility which is outside the scope of this post. Bottom line for me, for now... YM is a happy place. Thanks for asking.
I day trade Asian / European / US index futures commodities gold, copper, crude oil, NG long term bonds perhaps currency futures I stop trading food things like corn soya wheat, lean hog, cattle, coffee, milk agri things like rubber, palm oil silver, HO, RBOB
I'm still a rookie when it comes to NQ, but my impression is that it's easier to trade than ES in the sense that you can quickly B/E your entries as it's moving a lot. And if you generally like scalping there always seems to be something on the table while ES is more sluggish. This afternoon, NQ rallied 104.25 points off the lows. That's $2085 per contract. In comparison, ES did 26.75 points. That's $1337.50 per contract. That quick reversal after the false breakout on ES at the highs also indicated NQ could be running out of steam as well - peaking one minute ahead of NQ. I may be stating the obvious.
I do long term trading on some 60 futures so long as I can hedge in some way. Credit spreads on directional stocks, scalp top ten volume futures. Almost all are automated. Am working on fixing someone else's system for day trading, I have radically changed it to based on deviations of trajectory of a missile. Think star wars interception.
Funny you should mention that as I was actually thinking about asking you if you had run a back-test with the algorithm you're currently using on ES. I talked with a guy who ran an algorithmic strategy on NQ a few years ago and he said the same strategy was breakeven on ES.
That's an interesting fact. I'm currently testing ES during ETH cause right now I'm only trading during RTH. The thing is, with my current market data provider (IQ Feed) I'm allowed to download only up to 6 months of historical tick data, which is not enough to assess anything with a good level of confidence.
You can buy cheap more tickdata for ES with good quality at anfutures(.)com. Best value for that price. You do not get it cheaper elsewhere. It is only $74 for 20 years full of tick data here. I also bought from them some time ago. It is good.
I trade forex ERUUSD / USDJPY /GBPJPY are my pairs also I scalp Gold (it needs a high balance but can make you good profits once you have mastered the rules) Also I hold stocks such as JNJ just to invest my money.