Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Futures Trading Begins


This week I opened a Futures account with E*Trade.  With a  minimum account size of $10K, you get fairly cheap commissions for the first 3 months.  After that you can reduce the size to $2K, but I would not advise it.  Future's contracts are highly leveraged and you can quickly blow through a $2K account in minutes if you don't watch what you are doing.  I have watched on TastyTrade.com how its done have have read many articles about it.  

Now was time to test the waters and why not.  I can commit last month's profits to this endeavor.  I dont want to lose money, but the key seems to be just chart watching and to be very discipline with your entries and exits.  Since a $10K account really wont cover many contracts, I will be strictly day-trading and closing all positions at the end of the day.

My first trade was the ES, short for E-mini S&P.  Since it was trading up and near a 5min Bollinger band I decided to try shorting 1 contract.  Well, it proceeded to pop up a few more ticks, but eventually came back to earth and I covered within 60 mins for a $37.50 profit.  Good thing I did, since it bounce back up again.


Next ,I tried a few NQ contracts, which is the Nasdaq 100 futures.  This future really moves fast, but I told myself I would not chase and would alwasy let the market come to me.  It was Fed meeting day so I was long 4 contracts during the Fed Release and the initial move was down, then a huge spike up.  I quickly made over $500.  I scapled a few more long trades on the NQ and at the end of the day I was up $937.50 for the day.  My futures account was up over 9% in one day!  Do that 10 days in a row and Ill be up over 100%

Maybe I was lucky, maybe I was good or a combination of both.  Time will tell, but that was fun..  Things to keep in mind each ES Contract point is worth $50 and each .25 tick is $12.50.  Each NQ Contract point is worth $20 and each .25 tick is worth $5.

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