Quote from ang_99:
I would think the spread difference might make the es tougher, although I never traded the ES.
Any thoughts?
The spread shouldn't be that much of an issue.
On SPY, it's a penny. On ES, it's a tick.
I usually trade 1000-2000 shares of SPY at a time, so if I hit the bid or lift the offer, I'm out of the money roughly the same amount as one or two ES contracts.
ES is attractive for the ability to scale up. With only ten contracts, I can make $125/tick, or $1000 every two handles. I can keep scaling up to 50 contracts without too much of a hitch.
On SPY, I would need to get filled for 12,500 shares to get the same amount, which is not always easy to do.
Forget about getting 50,000 shares. If a trade that size goes against me on the SPY, I'm going down hard.
SPY is great for learning and if you want to trade less than a few thousand shares. For more than that, the ES seems to be less risky.