Futures or Stocks?! The truth
- Thread starter Spectra
- Start date
There are good arguments for and against it. Take this real life situation out (which happened to me when I started day trading).
# I scraped up everything I could absolutely afford to start a day trading account. I asked every friend..family member..sold unnecessary items.. you name it. I did it... ebay was my best friend. I ended up with about $25,500 to work with.
# The patterned day trading limit rule says you need to have $25,000 in your account to trade stocks. This put an enormous amount of stress on me. I could only think 'what happens if i go below my $25,000' I was scared to take even good setups. Finally one night I saw a decent setup and let it ride overnight. I figured if I could get up to $27,000 or so I'd worry less about breaking the limit. By morning I was down over $2,000 and could only place 3 trades every 5 days or so.
# Had I just started trading one Dow EMini YM contract with $15,000 I would of been in no danger of having my day trading privileges cut off.
Of course I probably would of got greedy and started trading 10 contracts.
Ahhh.. experience is key
# I scraped up everything I could absolutely afford to start a day trading account. I asked every friend..family member..sold unnecessary items.. you name it. I did it... ebay was my best friend. I ended up with about $25,500 to work with.
# The patterned day trading limit rule says you need to have $25,000 in your account to trade stocks. This put an enormous amount of stress on me. I could only think 'what happens if i go below my $25,000' I was scared to take even good setups. Finally one night I saw a decent setup and let it ride overnight. I figured if I could get up to $27,000 or so I'd worry less about breaking the limit. By morning I was down over $2,000 and could only place 3 trades every 5 days or so.
# Had I just started trading one Dow EMini YM contract with $15,000 I would of been in no danger of having my day trading privileges cut off.
Of course I probably would of got greedy and started trading 10 contracts.
Ahhh.. experience is key
I did not come back to stocks after trading the ER. The moves are just incredible compare to stocks. Remind me of the dotcom days. For daytraders, we all need intraday swings.
I recommend all stock traders to try trading futures at least a few months to see if they like it. For me it's a lot less work since all I have to do is track just one index all day.
I recommend all stock traders to try trading futures at least a few months to see if they like it. For me it's a lot less work since all I have to do is track just one index all day.
Agreed. Running a stock screener and jumping around to different momentum stocks makes things even harder for a newbie.
CajunSniper / Puretick.com Administrator-Trader
