Whooaa ... oh ok .. you mentor guarantees newbie profits trading for you even if you are "only" trading in the final hour of the day ? dude ... have you ever traded ETF's before? maybe start there ... less leverage .. lose less at first while you learn about what makes e minis move, esp in last hour -I am excited, and hope to average a minimum of $50 dollar gain per day, with one contract. $50, because I will only be able to trade the last hour of the market because of school.- -$50 is nice, but more realistically I'll be aiming for at least $100 gain per day, but $50 sounds good for the first few days/couple weeks- - Luckily, I have a mentor, so this should be no problem.- :eek:
JMowery1987, You can only trade the last hour? Not sure what you will be able to do with the last hour; who knows maybe you can do well. Here are some other options for you; you can run them by your mentor see what he thinks. You could buy options on the YM for longer term holds (but most people say to stay away from options). Good thing about them is you can still trade the YM but can only lose x amount. You could trade SSF single stock futures; longer term ie like off the 15 or 60 min charts. But those can leave you open to risk if you hold overnite so might not be a good idea. Maybe just playing with the YM for the last hour is a good start. let us know how you do
Volente. Seems like Im doing the same mistakes when I first started swing trading stocks. My entries are good... not letting the winners ride though. A couple small losses and Im even again. Just cant seem to catch on to this futures market yet.
Jzlucas Have you read all of this yet ? http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/cont_detail/0,3206,1180+17719,00.html This one really helped my trading of YM. http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/cont_detail/0,3206,1560+17731,00.html
Jmowery, you could always do what I did back when I was in school and take computer classes in the morning so you could trade during class.
Now here's a big question volente. Why YM? Why not ES or NQ? I like YM for purely newbie reasons. The tick size is small so it gives me more room for stops and therefore risk management. Hey those links are great volente, thanks!
I chose YM for the same reason you did when I started. But I also have always followed the Dow back when I was trading NYSE stocks and I would get frustated when the dow would move down 50 points and my stock only moved .10. I got really good at predicting when the dow would move up and down and but it was not reliable to use witht the stocks I traded on some days which left me looking for a way to capitalize on just the Dow movement. That is when Ym came into the picture.
Volente, thanks for the links... Ill be reading them now. I mistakenly thought I could go from swingtrading stocks to futures without a hitch! Ive been humbled!
Hey Fellow traders What are some different types of platforms and or charting services you use and why? Thanks. I use QT and I use Hot Keys in Interactive Brokers TWS Platform.
I've been paper trading with zerolinetrader's simulator as my IB front end. I use IB's charts which work just fine. The plan is to transition to zerolinetrader for real trading in a couple of weeks.