you either have a setup or you don't, right?
A quick look at the US indexes
- Thread starter Gabfly1
- Start date
you either have a setup or you don't, right?
you are not so forthcoming of your own particular edge in NQ, why do you care about what ES traders are doing?
I don't care what they are doing. That's their business. I'm only interested in their response to my assessment of the indexes and their relative "value," as I had described it. This thread is not about trading strategy. It is about evaluating the indexes in general terms irrespective of individual trading strategy.
You already know the answer, so what do you want?
"Based on daily range and tick size, all else being equal, TF provides the best value. The index that provides the least value (again, all else being equal) appears to be ES. Let me explain."
As a former ES trader with 10 years under my belt, I should say ES have offered better opportunities than both NQ and YM until Uncle Sam muddied the damn water.
Of the three, YM is the most erratic. Even though it comes with lower commish, the wider spread robs you of any added benefit.
NQ is a jackass minion of ES. I once traded NQ based on what I saw on ES. The downside is that NQ is only smaller in bet size. Hence a smaller prize. For example, if I were to simultaneously trade 1 lot in both ES and NQ, I would end up making more in ES than NQ. Don't let NQ fool you into believing that it will reap you a bigger profit because it has a larger moves than ES.
Anyway, ES is a dog herself these days. As another poster mentioned above, move to CL. Now she's a real sexy charm.
The downside is that you would likely risk disproportionately more on the ES trade than you would on the NQ trade, as I explained in my first post. That is the point. If you had risked a similar dollar amount, as determined by the size of your initial protective stop, you would likely have traded more NQ contracts than ES contracts, and that would have given you a larger dollar profit even after accounting for the additional commission cost.
And had you traded more NQ contracts, proportionately the larger your risk will be. So in the end, I don't see much difference. Anyway, not to derail this thread, I can only say ES is more efficient, perhaps too damn efficient, than any other index futures. The price movement is smooth and you rarely encounter sudden spikes that are so frequently present in others. However, in the end, it really all boils down to TIMING and RISK MANAGEMENT. That is the only true barometer to measuring success.