Hi ksonsinc, You'll be able to better answer that question yourself when you watch their charts and respected indexes side by side for many weeks or months... Simulate trade them or trade with 1 contract only until you determine which one is more suitable for your strategy and your goals. Some traders prefer YM while others prefer ES while others prefer NQ while others prefer ER2. Simply, if your planning on to exclusively trade one trading instrument... Best to monitor the realtime price actions of all four (ER2, ES, NQ and YM) to determine which is more suitable for you instead of letting someone else try to convince you one is better than the other. Mark (a.k.a. NihabaAshi) Japanese Candlestick term
thank you ET pll i have learnt a great deal about trading futures especially the ES ym and NQ i guess i should take a look at trading stock more as futures are very very risky i think All information is greatly appreciated thank you ksonsinc
Futures aren't THAT risky. As long as you set a max points for a downside, I think you have almost equal chance of going broke with futures as with stocks.
I was under the impression that with IB, trading futures you need more than $2000, because once you reach $2000 you can only close the trade, but can not start a new one until you put more money on the account. Or am I wrong? If that is true, you need at least $3000 to start with, so you can lose 200 YM points before your trading is over....
Sounds right to me. You have to have at least 2K with IB to have a margin account and you have to have a margin account to trade futures as far as I know. I have really never had less than 2K in an account so I could be wrong, but I do believe 2K is the minimum.
IB requires that you initally open the account with $10K although the minimums can drop to the SPAN limits that you indicated and $2K is the min required to keep an account open.
sure, you can daytrade the YM with 2000.00. many brokers offer 500.00 margin. this means you can lose 300 points in the YM before having a margin call. trade one contract, 300 points will give you an education, and who knows, you just mite get lucky! good luck, surfer
Traded on a simulator. If you want to put money in IB you can have a free datafeed. QuoteTracker will give you free charts. Ninja Trader has a great simulator that uses their data. For $50 a mo. you can see for yourself. But with only 2-3K you'll probably have to daytrade with a company that gives lower margins. Most of those require $3-5K initial deposit though.
Zeroline trader has a free simulator you can use until the end of time. It's not as sophisticated as Ninja Trader but I'm pretty happy with it (the full version that is).