The opening range breakout strategy, moving average crossover strategy, fibonacci retracement strategy, Bollinger Band penetration strategy, etc., are excellent strategies for trading.
From experience I know that each of these strategies is applicable to equities and futures. Exclusively equities, no. Exclusively futures, no.
The commonality among these systems is they are more attractive when using vehicles with greater volume and volatility. The ES and NQ represent better futures vehicles than corn, wheat or oats for daytrading. C, IBM, and AIG represent better equity vehicles than BYD or HGR for daytrading.
Many, many of the active participants on ET trade the ES and NQ almost exclusively. They make great vehicles with which to try different trading strategies. All of these strategies are not exclusively applicable to the ES and NQ.
Indeed, the SP daytrading method linked to in TriPacks excellent thread Gems, states that the method is not just applicable to the SP big contract, but admonishes that the chosen vehicle needs to have enough intraday volatility to make the trade worthwhile. Vehicle selection is accomplished in this particular method by taking the ratio of: the 10 day average range between the open and the close, and the 10 day average range between the high and the low. In 'candle-speak', this will select candidates whose average candle body occupies at least 50% of the total candle size.
Very few strategies are applicable only to futures. I suspect it is coincidence rather than outright necessity that the strategies discussed have referenced the ES and NQ as exemplar vehicles.
