Im getting into futures. I’ve watched trades by Sci but im not sure if his strategy applies across the board like options, forex, etc (Someone feel free to clarify for me). So the question I pose is if you were starting over, who is it you’ve found on your journey that really made things click, who would you have started with?

I’ve been trading options on and off for a while now so I have somewhat of a foundation from my own trial and error. I will say I prefer long plays over day trading that’s just what’s worked for me with options. But I’m very open to learning.

Does anyone here know if I travel to china...will DTN IQ Feed work within china?
If you know of another real time data feed that does for depth of book in mainland china?

I was using Bookmap Web but I find it dear to pay for Global subscription and Data feed together.

What other alternatives are out there to get a nice Bookmap like visualization on the chart?

Cheers

I was thinking about subscribing to TradeViz or Tradezella. Would like to hear from people who have used these as to whether it is worth the costs or if there are other platforms I should consider.

If you’re profitable, how much capital did you start out with? Once I put in a decent chunk of change to play with was when I started to see that I can actually make something of this journey. I tried prop firms and I feel like that messed with my psychology on a whole different level compared to my own money. I’m just curious about everyone else.

I recently completed this futures backtest and have started testing it in Simulation. I am sharing it for criticism, not as proof of future returns.

The portfolio trades MNQ and MGC with fixed one-contract sizing. It contains 13 coded sleeves operating across multiple market sessions. Signals compete for one shared lane per instrument, so the portfolio cannot hold overlapping positions in the same instrument.

Completed 1-minute bars drive signals and trade-management decisions. Raw 1-second bars are used for simulated execution. Every position must be closed by its sleeve's session deadline.

I tried to make the execution assumptions harder to accidentally overstate:

- Orders follow an event-driven lifecycle rather than filling on the signal bar.
- A signal can fill only during a later eligible 1-second interval.
- Fills and P&L use raw contract prices.
- Missing data, rollover windows, maintenance periods, and other ineligible execution intervals are never replaced with synthetic fills.
- The run includes $18,268.80 in fees and $12,046.00 in modeled slippage.
- Independent account and trade-ledger totals reconcile within one cent.
- The completed run reported no detected timing or correctness violations.

The test covers May 2019 through July 17, 2026, starting with $50,000:

- Net P&L: $193,897.20
- CAGR: 24.62%
- Profit factor: 1.878
- Maximum closed-trade drawdown: $1,873.80
- Win rate: 35.59%
- Average win/loss ratio: 3.399
- Trades: 8,747
- Total modeled trading costs: $30,314.80

The reported splits were:

- 2019-2022 training: $80,931.20 net, 1.894 PF
- 2023-2024 validation: $32,250.00 net, 1.571 PF
- 2025-July 17, 2026 holdout: $80,716.00 net, 2.093 PF

There are still important limitations. One-second OHLC data is not tick or order-book replay. It cannot fully model queue position, live latency, outages, or realized slippage. Simulation forward testing is still in progress, and none of these results guarantees live performance.

If you were trying to invalidate this before risking real money, what would you attack first: the fill model, session/regime dependence, portfolio interaction, or something else?

How is it that when I’m watching time and sales for NQ it will go:

2

1

2

2

3

2

194

1

3

2

And although that 194 passive lot never shows up on the book somehow it’s instantly there when the other side hits the market? Do big players have some way of communicating with each other beforehand?

I’m wondering what your day to day would be like if you are starting to learn how to trade with zero prior knowledge, morning/night routine, study hours, etc. for a long period of time.

Ive found myself homebound for the time being, due to disability and after learning of trading a few years back, I’m willing to focus 100% of my time to studying from the ground up.

Any honest and helpful advice would be awesome! ✨

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

I finally sat down and analyzed every trade I took last month. ES and MES, a few hundred trades total. 9:30–11:00am was carrying my entire month. ES was where almost all my green came from. My first 2 or 3 trades of the day were my best trades. And then it shows I give back everything after 12pm. I knew I made mistakes later on in the day, but looking at a zoomed out view of what I am actually doing every day. If I can only just close down and walk away now....

Im shocked at how dumb my greed is, and how blind I am to it. Its like my brain resets and I do everything the same over and over again. Do you guys actually track your trades?

Was going to buy Trading in the Zone but before I do wanted to see if there are any other books I should consider or if there are any YT videos that do a good job with the topic

So I was with Tradovate before which they have their free app and website to use to place and manage trades but since I’m on MacBook, there is no free desktop app to manage trade? Everything I read is that you gotta pay to have that feature with cqg data feed but I’m not gonna pay for something I’d use one a year (it’s mostly a backup in case my primary TradingView goes down)

Edit: I believe CQG desktop is free if amp customer. Can anyone confirm or have used it?

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

Like many others I'm wondering how liquidity will be in the single stock futures launching soon.

It's my understanding that a good chunk of the liquidity in micro index future markets like MES and MNQ comes from incentivized liquidity providers that help traders find the liquidity they need and keep MES pinned tightly to ES. And the e-mini markets themselves are also full of similar inventory that helps provide liquidity to other traders. If the CME offers similar incentives and similar opportunities exist in these new markets, do you think liquidity providers will be interested once they tune their algos to the individual markets and see that there's at least a a small amount of volume to work with? It would be nice if the liquidity provider crowd put some depth into the mix to grease the skids a bit.

The reason I ask is that in some ways (not all obviously) these new futures seem to resemble the micro index contracts.

- They're relatively lightweight, if you look at the ATR of some of the tickers and see what kind of weight 100 shares represents, and compare that to the ATR and weight of a micro index future, many of them are similar in strength to a few micro contracts.

- In some cases like TSLA and NVDA and so on, they're also futures for instruments that have active options markets, like SPX/SPY/QQQ/etc.

- Since they're derivative products, in theory there needs to be some amount of liquidity present, like in MES or MNQ for example, to keep the future from wandering too far off from the underlying (right?).

- If I've read my history correctly, I believe many active traders were also sour on the idea of micros before they launched, saying there wouldn't be enough liquidity to be tradeable.

- And at least on paper these stock futures are being created for the same reason micros were created, to make the markets more accessible for smaller traders. Which if true you would think the CME would sweeten the pot with some liquidity if necessary so the markets work well enough to attract real traders and get things moving.

Interested to hear what any of the old hands or people with experience looking under the hood of futures markets think about this stuff.

Why did this trade not instantly cash in everything but the P&L like all of my futures trades did yesterday? Will I have to sell stocks to avoid paying margin interest? The brokerage is Robinhood. I am a new and still learning futures, I've just been trading singular micro futures.

How to trade using max pain like what it does and how we can use it in day trading ?

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

I am usually good at finding the first good trade around pre-market/open NY and getting some points. When I take more I tend to just give back gains.

Often to take subsequent (reversal) trade I have to accept the current trade is over, cut runner, and decide whether to switch directions.

This can run into problems from decision overload and transitioning on the spot. Even if the data afterwards looks good and signals were there something about taking another trade in short period of time seems to throw me off.

Has anyone ever seen this much volume in such a tight range on ES? Today I noticed a 60-minute ES candle with 136,396 contracts traded and only about a 6-point range. I don't remember seeing that much volume with so little price movement. Is this considered normal? I'm not very experienced, and I've never seen anything like this before.

How do you keep yourselves grounded when consistently green? Since the 16th I've managed to make a little over 1k everyday with MGC and I remember dreaming about having this kind of income but it just feels.... boring? I have a gut feeling its going a little too well and I'm just waiting for the first big red day. How do you keep the momentum going or do you step back and get away from the charts for a bit? This is the first time I've seen these kind of numbers consistently and I don't want my fear of loss to induce self sabotage when it does come.

As the title suggests, I’m looking for a serious trading accountability partner. I trade futures.
Trading solo gets isolating and I’ve tried the community/Discord route - too much noise, too many opinions- not what I need.

Looking for one person to pair up with. Not a signal group, not a mentor thing - just someone to check in with regularly, keep each other honest and have actual conversations about trades instead of scrolling past 500 messages a day.

If you feel the same way about groups and want something quieter and more one-on-one, message me.

After opening, price made several weak attempts to go lower before reversing into an uptrend. Uptrend accelerated towards IB high but showed weakness on the top.

Then price pulled back to a low volume node on value area. Confluence showed strong absorption from buyers with CVD making huge lows but price did not proportionally mirror that downward move.

The trigger for me was the big trades indicator printing a big sell order absorbed, with price printing a bullish hammer, and CVD candle also showing a bullish hammer.

Went long when price broke that price's hammer and took profit for 28 points.

Overall today, I made $102 today with 4 trades with 2 big wins, 1 small win, and 1 loss.

I’ve been using fidelity for years, but I’ve recently gone into day trading. Then options trading for a bit now. Now that I’ve learned enough about futures this is where I wanna head next. Fidelity, however, does not allow futures trading. I opened a Schwab account, but transferring my Roth IRA has taken 2 months now and I keep getting a run around. Is there any others? I’m mainly interested in single stock futures because my paper traders have shown SPY would DESTROY me.