Background â Longtime serious but recreational trader doing mostly swing but some day trading when the market permits. Last blow-up was back in the tech bubble. Since then I have never had a losing year but I have never had a killer year either. The rule I live by is that I have to beat the S&P or CD rates whichever is higher for the year or I have to give-up my passion, trading.
Anyhow, I had never traded Futures and decided to give it a try after reading about it on ET for years. I opened/funded a Futures capable account with 5k. My original plan was to trade ES but the day margin requirement was more than the 5K I had deposited. However, NQ was tradable with my 5K so I was in business.
From the get go, futures was a different animal from trading stocks. At least it was for me. Being totally lost I kept a tight stop so I would only be down about 35 to 45 bucks per trade (adventure
). Within the first hour I was down about $120 and spent the rest of the day breakeven to -200. I tried different methods of getting into and out of trades. I first used price action and volume to enter trades and a stop loss to exit. Entries were ok but not great, exits where horrible due to the swings that took me out. I switched from stop loss exits to predefined exit targets based on a nice channel that traded for about an hour or so. This definitely worked much better. I sat out towards the end of the day because NQ started acting âdifferentâ and I could not read anything from the action.
I closed out the day with my $5,000 being reduced to $4,802 on 18 round trips. All I can say is that I had a total blast for the $198.00.
Thanks to all the ETers that provided valuable tidbits on futures trading. Yes, I was a cowboy today; lost money but dam I had fun.
Good trading allâ¦
Anyhow, I had never traded Futures and decided to give it a try after reading about it on ET for years. I opened/funded a Futures capable account with 5k. My original plan was to trade ES but the day margin requirement was more than the 5K I had deposited. However, NQ was tradable with my 5K so I was in business.
From the get go, futures was a different animal from trading stocks. At least it was for me. Being totally lost I kept a tight stop so I would only be down about 35 to 45 bucks per trade (adventure
). Within the first hour I was down about $120 and spent the rest of the day breakeven to -200. I tried different methods of getting into and out of trades. I first used price action and volume to enter trades and a stop loss to exit. Entries were ok but not great, exits where horrible due to the swings that took me out. I switched from stop loss exits to predefined exit targets based on a nice channel that traded for about an hour or so. This definitely worked much better. I sat out towards the end of the day because NQ started acting âdifferentâ and I could not read anything from the action.I closed out the day with my $5,000 being reduced to $4,802 on 18 round trips. All I can say is that I had a total blast for the $198.00.
Thanks to all the ETers that provided valuable tidbits on futures trading. Yes, I was a cowboy today; lost money but dam I had fun.
Good trading allâ¦
