Granville,
Here's my understanding:
1. To open an account you need to deposit with them a certain minimum, e.g., $5,000;
2. In order to trade the NQ, you need a certain margin per contract, e.g., $4,500/contract - with which margin you are allowed to take a position overnight;
3. After you open a account and trade it a little, your maintenance margin is allowed to drop a little, like, if the broker had a margin requirement of $4500 per contract for overnight positions, now, after losing some money, they will allow you to continue trading one contract with just $4,000 remaining in the account;
4. If you just daytrade, or for positions kept strictly for the day (e.g., liquidated by 4 pm ET) the margin is often about half of the margin required to maintain for overnight positions;
5. They strongly advise you to always have a stop loss order in the system for each open position. In practice that means that they may monitor your trading (especially in the beginning) and complain if you don't do that (which, of course, is an excellent way to trade, don't trade without doing it), but even more importantly, if you have no stop loss in and Sadam or UBL does this or that and the market does that or this in return, and the damage to your account is greater than the amount you had in to start with (say, $50,000 for a $20,000 account) they can sue you for the rest and you cannot say that it was not your fault. Remember, in trading futures, you can lose a lot more than you had initially.
Also remember that there are tools like bracket-trader or futures-trader that place a bracket automatically upon opening a new position --- and you can define the bracket to be wider than necessary (say, you want to go for a 2 pt gain and you'll monitor your position like a hawk to finetune profit target and stop-loss, but the tool can place a 3-5 pt PT/SL just for safety.)
I have been trading the ES/NQ and other futures for a number of years now. My advice is not to listen to unscrupulous brokers who try to attract your business by offering very low margins (down to $250/contract in one instance.) My strategy has been to budget at least $10,000 per contract traded, although my broker (IB) only demands the $4,000 / $2,000 for the ES/NQ which is the [more or less] standard in the industry.
Hope this helps - good luck!
Here's my understanding:
1. To open an account you need to deposit with them a certain minimum, e.g., $5,000;
2. In order to trade the NQ, you need a certain margin per contract, e.g., $4,500/contract - with which margin you are allowed to take a position overnight;
3. After you open a account and trade it a little, your maintenance margin is allowed to drop a little, like, if the broker had a margin requirement of $4500 per contract for overnight positions, now, after losing some money, they will allow you to continue trading one contract with just $4,000 remaining in the account;
4. If you just daytrade, or for positions kept strictly for the day (e.g., liquidated by 4 pm ET) the margin is often about half of the margin required to maintain for overnight positions;
5. They strongly advise you to always have a stop loss order in the system for each open position. In practice that means that they may monitor your trading (especially in the beginning) and complain if you don't do that (which, of course, is an excellent way to trade, don't trade without doing it), but even more importantly, if you have no stop loss in and Sadam or UBL does this or that and the market does that or this in return, and the damage to your account is greater than the amount you had in to start with (say, $50,000 for a $20,000 account) they can sue you for the rest and you cannot say that it was not your fault. Remember, in trading futures, you can lose a lot more than you had initially.
Also remember that there are tools like bracket-trader or futures-trader that place a bracket automatically upon opening a new position --- and you can define the bracket to be wider than necessary (say, you want to go for a 2 pt gain and you'll monitor your position like a hawk to finetune profit target and stop-loss, but the tool can place a 3-5 pt PT/SL just for safety.)
I have been trading the ES/NQ and other futures for a number of years now. My advice is not to listen to unscrupulous brokers who try to attract your business by offering very low margins (down to $250/contract in one instance.) My strategy has been to budget at least $10,000 per contract traded, although my broker (IB) only demands the $4,000 / $2,000 for the ES/NQ which is the [more or less] standard in the industry.
Hope this helps - good luck!
