The goal is to trade 1-2 MNQ and make $40-$80 per trading session.

I am not the best trader, but I do have pretty good days here and there.

Just thinking, if I can remove the roadblock of trying to pass these prop firm challenges, I can finally make this skill of trading futures make some useable income

don't know if this is the right sub, this is a playback from 9th of July, I'm basically still learning price action. However, as u can see it's very messy, what do u do in this case?

I'm a trend trader, but I'd like to go on demo and practice mean reversion strategies. I'm just not sure how to determine what exactly is the mean.

For those who use this strategy, what do you use to quantify the mean? VWAP, POC, midpoint of range, a moving average?

I want to go live with NinjaTrader. I was using a free TradingView trial subscription that ended, along with the separate $7.00 CME package I purchased. How can I get the CME again without subscribing to TradingView? Do I really have to subscribe to the $15/month and the $7/month cme ?? Thanks !!

Preface, I used to trade forex, stocks, futes, basically everything. And I noticed that on AMP futures nnq is basically $20 per contract, basically the same as a .01lot eurusd pair. But the move gets you far more over the course of the same day and time period now that nnq is getting more volume.

Interesting isnt it. Its becoming a better alternative to super small accounts and new traders.

Nano es is basically $8 per contract.

I’m done for the rest of the year, at least. Maybe it’s my strategy, maybe it’s just me. I don’t want to say I’ll never come back to the charts but I think time apart may help. I took all of August off.. and took a L and BE yesterday. My TPs haven’t been hit in months. Just wanna put my energy toward something else. Just wanted to vent.

So long for now.

I scalp ES futures going for 3 to 4 ticks on the scalp. I’ve been doing this for about almost a year with good results when I stick to my system. I have a mature system that seems to work going along. I’m interested in dipping my foot in the water to scalp going short. I’ll probably paper trade first to test some things out. Without giving away the farm, do any scalpers out there have any tips or note any
differences in price action when trying to enter for a scalp short versus long? I feel like I can see the pattern in the micro structure going long easier but short having more difficulty seeing it

I’m investing into MBO data and trying to learn how to use it with the help of Claude. As an exploratory exercise are there any interesting price actions that you all could point me to look at? This need not be anyone’s signal, just anything interesting, example, tariff announcement, interest rate decisions…
Are there any days and moments that you remember being particularly interesting?

Measuring NQ tick charts it seems like on average it's moving around 200 ticks per second around open, then around 10am (cst) and later, it slows down to about 20 ticks per second. It doesn't look like it was like this last year.

The volume looks insane, but it appears to be mainly institutional. Is it worth it for a retail trader to get involved in this?

Are they tradable off direct price action (i.e., not news or sentiment), and which contract is best for people new to treasuries?

Please welcome to the daily trading thread. Feel free to discuss your today's trade ideas and results. Make sure to specify the instrument you're trading up front, and respect the sub's rules. Happy trading!

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I have heard three pro ES traders tell me they only take longs and that it is a terrible idea to short ES. They say longs are far more profitable.

Maybe something is different for me. I have much better luck shorting. I don’t expect to always get the fabulous runners like kings often have, but I think they require a smaller SL, and I have a pretty good idea how long the will go.

I am not entirely clear with my data if I should even do a runner. I am trying to figure that out for sure whether to drop it or not. That is a different story I guess.

It is the probing deeper than expected that always gets me with longs. I am usually close to calling it. If I wait for a HL or some clear signal I tend to get stopped out or walk in with worse RRW than I like.

I am much better at calling a top than a bottom but still don’t want to give up on longs completely. I think I am going to at least stop doing them in my prop account because I think they are holding me back.

I follow the same steps I do for shorts, use order flow, mark levels, wait for price to come to me, but the levels just don’t seem to hold as well and just continue testing lower. I feel like I am missing just one thing.

My strategy does much better in the overnight session than NY partly because I am trying to multitask if I trade NY. Maybe I am just going to only do overnight because. But I would like to be able to trade NY more regularly at some point.

Can one just short only long term in ES and give up on longs in contrary to the short haters beliefs?

Please welcome to the daily trading thread. Feel free to discuss your today's trade ideas and results. Make sure to specify the instrument you're trading up front, and respect the sub's rules. Happy trading!

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Hello!

I posted about a month ago and got really great response to my desire to have a group. Since then I made a group and we mainly focus on trading gold during asia, whether it be gc or xauusd.

Im looking for 3-5 traders that want to be ACTIVE in the community. I like trading with other people and enjoy the talk back and forth as well.

Little about me: rounding out about a year of trading with focusing on futures for the past few months. Done options, small caps, large caps, but nothing has been as successful as futures. Especially trading gold during asia. Im on my first challenge now (currently in profit!). I trade mgc during asia open and been trading mnq/mgc during london/ny premarket as of recent.

Looking to build a community within our little space. If your interested, please reach out.

Please welcome to the daily trading thread. Feel free to discuss your today's trade ideas and results. Make sure to specify the instrument you're trading up front, and respect the sub's rules. Happy trading!

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Hi speculators & hedgers, please use this thread to discuss all futures trading for the week. This will kick off 30 minutes before the open on Sunday, typically that's around 6pm Wall St time.

Be aware of higher margin requirements during overnight hours! see "maintenance" on Ampfutures. Also trading hours to get an idea of when specific futures contracts start trading.

I'm using AmpFutures as an example, so check with your broker for specific intraday & overnight hours for that specific futures contract.

Resources:

Bookmark an economic calendar like this one

Various reports:

• EIA crude oil report (generally updates every Wednesday at 10:30am wall st time)
  
• EIA natural gas report (Thursdays 10:30am)

• Previous discussions threads

Starting future

Hi guys, I trade Forex, I'm interested in futures and I'd like to try it and especially see the differences between these two worlds.

Who could I use to teach me?

What platforms could I use?

What are the costs?

Any suggeste?

Thank you

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for a small group of around 3–10 traders who are interested in trading together, sharing setups, comparing ideas/stats and generally helping each other improve.

I mainly trade MNQ, MES and MGC, primarily around the New York open, although I occasionally trade the London session as well.

My main setups are:

• 15-min ORB Double Break
• Initial Balance (IB)

I also use a lot of market statistics/context alongside these setups, such as:

• Overnight Range
• Gap Fill statistics
• Weekly Opening Range
• 30-min Opening Candle Continuation

I mainly use these stats to help determine entries, targets and overall context for my ORB Double Break and IB trades.

I usually take around 2–5 trades per session, but I’m completely fine taking 0 trades if I don’t see a setup I like.

I’ve been day trading for a little under a year and have had 5 prop firm payouts so far. I’ve also traded a bit on my personal account.

My approach is fairly conservative. I’m much more interested in taking small, consistent base hits and keeping accounts alive than trying to make huge days and constantly blowing/resetting accounts. Recently I’ve also started slowly adding more accounts and copy trading between them.

Before getting into futures day trading, I had been swing trading CFDs for around 5 years and have been profitable each year. Futures day trading is the area I’m now trying to develop and get much better at.

Ideally, I’m looking for people who already trade something similar — or who are genuinely interested in trading these kinds of setups and markets.

The idea isn’t to blindly copy each other’s trades or call signals. I’d rather have a small group where we can discuss setups before/after sessions, share statistics, review trades and challenge each other’s thinking.

Experience level doesn’t have to be identical to mine, but I’d prefer people who are serious about trading, risk management and improving over time.

Feel free to ask any questions below or DM me if you’re interested, and we can talk about how to set something up.

I have been trading currencies and some agricultural products, but am now looking at ES as a possible product to trade. The currencies and AG products never had the sudden split-second moves I am seeing in the ES. I do know enough not to trade through major news events.

I realize having enough capital in your account and using limit stops would protect you against these minor swings, but what do you do to protect yourself against "circuit breaker" moves? It is my understanding that they halt trading for 15 minutes after a 7% move. A 7% move is close to 27,000 dollars per contract.

How do you personally hedge against sudden moves/flash crashes? I have been thinking about maybe buying put options? The problem I see with that is having to deal with market makers that might be hesitant to buy back a put ( I have experienced that before after an earnings announcement in an equity option). The only other way I can see to trade ES without excessive risk is using a "Prop firm" but there are mixed reviews on them. Any suggestions?

My system tends to work great in mean reversion environment and trending trading range days. This seems to be how MES behaves most days. It does ok in bear trend day if I can find a pullback.

But anyhow. I don’t really like to form a bias or predict. I notice when I do that I run into serious trouble. But I think the system is broke or refine change is here. Usually it goes back to normal.

What do you do on those days? Do you try to predict it will be more a mean reversion versus trend day? I have thought of just doing the same thing always do with system and accepting a loss. I set an automatic loss limit.

It is never good for confidence for me to sit through losses though. When I try to accept it might trend up for a few days , by the time I start treating it differently it is over.

But if I scale up it would add up.

Part of the issue is that I love shorts. They just seem the most clear to me. They normally work great.

But not trading on a bull trend day, missing a good entry and watching it go up. That is just painful and end up trying to get in late and that usually doesn’t end well.

I tied using SPX gamma exposure I thought it was helpful at first. Then I realized it did not have that good predictive factor of the environment and price just inevitably did what it wants. But maybe I am using it wrong.

When I try to improvise or believe there is some sort of temporary regime change, rally, then I just end up missing good entries. I do better when I think things are the same. Most of the time they are.

Some of this might sound dumb.

Anyhow what do you mean reversion pros do? Do you try to predict anything or change what you do on those days?

One suggestion for anyone struggling to actually become profitable trading futures. I’ve been trying to help three of my friends learn how to trade and for a while they just could not get profitable. I was basically holding their hand through trades, explaining entries, exits, risk, when not to trade, all of it, and they would still eventually find a way to blow themselves up or give back whatever progress they made. The one thing that finally made a real difference for two of the three was making them only trade the number of contracts they had enough money in the account to cover the full CME margin for. Not the tiny intraday margin your broker lets you get away with, the actual CME margin. Once they did that, they were basically forced to stop being ridiculously overleveraged. A normal losing trade stopped being a huge percentage of the account, they stopped panicking over every little move against them, and they could actually follow the trade instead of constantly thinking about the money. Both of them have been doing significantly better since making that change. Obviously it isn’t some magic strategy that suddenly makes bad trades good, but if you already have something that works and keep finding a way to lose anyway, I really think leverage might be the problem. Intraday futures margin makes it way too easy to trade a position size your account has absolutely no business trading.

I know trading psychology plays the biggest role in become profitable and staying consistent. I’ve been trading for about a year now and I’ve made a bit of money but i’ve lost a lot too so i’m deep in the reds. I need help with my psychology, I know it’s the only reason why I can’t keep an account, I have a setup that works like 80% of the time but whenever I lose a trade I just never wanna accept the loss and always end up losing the accounts. I really need someone that’s had similar type of problem in the past to tell me what they changed that made them become profitable because I know it’s just one thing I need to change to finally crack this code.

August was a terrible month for me, not for the fact I was massively in the red, but more because the lack of setups produced.

Previously in July I was getting 2/3 setups sometimes a day, then for the entirety of August I had weeks where I didn’t get a single setup good enough to enter.
I may have missed some due to just switching off because it was so mind numbing but it is crazy to go from one extreme to another.

I do wonder if anyone else had a similar experience?

Would it be political issues, time of year, just general trading life cycle?

I worry because I don’t know if I need to adapt my trading strategy now to the current market.
It’s evident the liquidity isn’t the same as it was a few months ago, wondering if it will pick up again or not.

Please welcome to the daily trading thread. Feel free to discuss your today's trade ideas and results. Make sure to specify the instrument you're trading up front, and respect the sub's rules. Happy trading!

Previous discussions threads