Quote from Fast_Trader:
Scientist, you were saying the YM is great for scalping, and I agree, it has quick moves. But the low $/tick value is a bit misleading IMHO because YM just moves faster. Yes, it's $5/tick, but in the time that ES moves 1 pt ($50), YM moves 10 ($50), so I'm not seeing the advantage here. I think YM would be good for swing trading as well. Your thoughts?
-Fast
Well, if this were the case, then even better so, not???
I'm not sure if you realize what I'm getting at here. The point, for day trading and particularly scalping, is that the larger the daily tick range, the more opportunities for entry/exit you will get.
To visualize this in a rather crass way: Where do you have more opportunities to enter and exit, making money:
a) Index with 10T daily range
b) Index with 1,000T daily range
Getting it? It's not only the sensitivity of entry & exit, but it's also (particularly) the relative distance you "travel" with every tick. You need to understand this, because it's extremely crucial. It's one of the major factors that makes futures more difficult than stocks, for example, which have a tiny tick size, thus zillions of opportunities.
Now that you understood this, look at some average daily ranges (in ticks):
ES: 40T ($500)
NQ: 60T ($500)
YM: 100T ($500)
These are pretty accurate figures. The $ range is almost the same on all US indices. But the tick range is very different. ES is the toughest to trade, and YM clearly leads the roost here.
And here's the king of 'em all:
DAX: 120T (~$1,875)
