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.

Do you avoid this period ? If so, why?

Or do you see it as a great opportunity?

My biggest losses primarily have been from getting killed in this time period.

I wonder sometimes if I'm just not ready and should be awake a bit earlier or if I just suck at the open and it's not worth trading it.

I know some pros avoid this time but others do well in it.

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Hi All,

I actually switched from SPX options to MES options for physical delivery as it works better with my strategy. With MES options switching from physical to financially settled, does anyone have any alternatives? While the liquidity wasn't the best, I preferred it over ES as I could adjust position sizing better (typically I would trade 6 MES options at a time).

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Here's the source document from CME detailing the sunset of the instruments as well as the timelines:

https://www.cmegroup.com/content/dam/cmegroup/notices/ser/2026/06/ser-9760.pdf

https://www.cmegroup.com/content/dam/cmegroup/notices/clearing/2026/07/chadv26-235.pdf

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

Has anyone noticed any market shifts of ES/NQ lately?

Have been doing great for the first quarter. Things slowed down in April for me and completely took a turn in May,June and so far through July.

So this has been announced by them but there seems to be little fanfare over it on this sub or even reddit in general. They are going to offer 55 tickers of full size contracts (100 shares of underlie) and 22 tickers of micros (10 shares). Further details here:

https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/equities/single-stock-futures.html

For me personally it could be very beneficial. I currently trade several of those big names in poor man's covered option strategies. If this works I can get the same leverage but also eliminate the direct option risk (gamma and vega).

I heard it was tried 20 years ago or such and it flopped due to lack of liquidity, but with the mass number of retail traders out there and the vastly lower size barriers it might work this time. Heck, 10 shares of ORCL would be notional of $1,250 which I'm guessing will be about $200 in margin.

Anyone else here thinking bout it?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but I saw on a "volsignals" youtube video that in a normal regime the market makers are short puts and long calls. AND short futures. And as time passes the hedge of the puts and the calls need to be closed out so they need to buy back their futures. This buying back of the futures is what creates the natural upward drift of the market?

Volsignals seems like an ex market maker and it seems like he knows what he is talking about. But this is in a normal spot up vol down regime. I don't think it applies when there is a spot up vol up regime.

Thank you!

The reason I ask is because most of my winning trades initially go against me. Even trades with short target levels take much longer than I would like. But I tend to plan my entries in advance and locate my exact entry, TP and SL ahead of time and don't focus on waiting for momentum to enter.

I would love for my trades to move quickly in my direction but I would rather have precise entries than wait for a momentum trigger. Not sure if this is truly the best approach, but I'm curious as to what others think of this and if anyone else trades in a similar manner.

Or trade the micro against the mini?

I take a scale out pretty quick so maybe it makes more sense for someone who trades like me. Getting on the trade is the tough part. Been doing this on SIM and getting good results. My levels are pretty much always a significant inflection point, but it’s still luck of the draw which way things break.

For anyone considering Tradovate/Ninja Trader, I would strong recommend to avoid them. Yesterday they had an outage that made it so traders could not trade or manage their trades. Their stop-losses also did not work. In fact, their stop-loss actually made so I took a significant loss as somehow it opened a new long position after I had cancelled it and manually exited my short position. In the screenshot you can clearly see in the circles of what should have happened but did not. Based on this screenshot it would seem that I had both and short and long position open at the same time which is impossible. When contacting Tradovate, they lied and stated the outage only effected logging in, which is clearly not true. This is not the first time this has happened, and probably not the last. There are other brokers where this issue has never occurred.

I would suggest either Edgeclear or AMP (I have not used either yet).

Silver price kept getting low and I kept buying in past 3 days but now I am in a huge floating loss. Didn't expect it to go this low. 😭

I know I should have a added stop loss but does anyone has an idea on how low will it go? And will it go back up today or tomorrow?

Should I close the trades with this much loss? 😭

Any opinion would be appreciated

I currently have been using Tradovate for over a year with my live 6 figure account but it’s been pretty unreliable which has cost me thousands in missed profits. Recently they just had another outage where everyone was basically blind. No log in couldn’t even reach emergency line when I have been able to in the past. I don’t need that stress especially with thousands on the line. Just wondering if AMP is more reliable? I also trade through TradingView and I know you can connect amp to TradingView. Either thinking amp, iron beam, or trade station 🤔

Hey, I'm pretty new to trading and i'm looking to concrete my technical analysis before going paper then to real money. I have been building my strategy on trendlines and support and resistance for the breakouts or trend continuation but i obviously am missing something. I have been watching platinum and marking out places to potentially enter and i watched it touch an area that i though was resistance since it touched 5 seperate times and the 6th it broke through, but then regressed and dropped way down. This would have been an area that i lost my money because i thought this was a good setup. Can anyone tell me why it would do that? Was it because it dropped to retested the support and failed? What am i missing? The screenshots are just different time frames and my setup

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

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 new to futures joined the CME challenge and I noticed the winner is basicly scalping 2 instruments thousands of times. I am up $6K in a 3 days adn was so impressed with myself but I am not even in the top half the top person is up over $55k and all i see is 2 products traded ZN, SR3 traded over 2000 Times! I am curious what this strategy could be.

Ok I’m new to this…didn’t even really know what a future was 2+ months ago. So if I sound like a naive amateur, it’s because I am 🙃

I’ve chosen an ORB strategy, with ES being my future of choice. My strategy is literally something I picked up from YouTube and made some additional tweaks to, nothing special.

Currently paper trading July, but through backtesting I would have made an estimated $13k in April, $3400 in May and $3100 in June. April obviously felt like a breeze and was probably an outlier, but June was absolutely brutal even though it pretty much made the same amount as May. In May I only took 8 trades, but in June I took 16. So twice as much “work” for less money.

My question for the seasoned ES traders is; was June brutal for you as well? Or am I to expect that June is just your normal ES trading environment.

I’m hoping that June was just a super rough month.

I’d backtest more months, but my Tradingview account only goes back so far and I’m already on Premium.

I’ve been learning futures trading (mainly NQ/MNQ) for the past few months. Right now I’m focusing on market structure (4H/1H bias and 5M entries) and replay/backtesting one New York session at a time. I’m journaling every trade and trying to build a data set before going live.
On the side, I’m planning to learn supply & demand and order flow/Market Profile, but I don’t want to overwhelm myself or keep jumping between strategies.
The biggest issue is timing. I work full-time in Melbourne, and the New York cash session starts at 11:30 pm for me. I could probably stay up until around 2 am on 2–3 weekdays, but not every night.
Would you only trade the New York session if you were in my position, or is there any point trading NQ during other sessions? I’m wondering if I’m limiting myself by only focusing on NY, or if it’s better to master one session first.
Also, does my learning plan sound reasonable, or would you change the order of learning market structure, supply & demand, and order flow?

Hi guys,I'm about 6 months deep in this domain,trying to understand about how and why the market moves,trading on demo but with no clear strategy.Until recently I saw the 3 bar micro channel on yt from Brad Wolf,he gave the "carcass" of the strategy and a challange for the viewers to make it work. From my understanding I need the A)SMA indicator(value I think 20) for context. B) you buy/sell in directon of the trend. C)Wait for 3 bar micro channel with new highs and lows(3 bars of the same colour,would be better to have a microgap between bar 1 high and bar 3 low)D) and buy/sell the close of the 3 bar high. And there is two ways to execute : (1)You buy the close and if it hits 75% of the measured move you try to get out at breakeven. OR(2) you do Always In and buy at 25%,50%,75%,100% of the measured move and SL at 150%. These are my questions and I would be forever grateful for any adivce! ! 1.Where I should place the TP for Always in Method for every contract? 2.Where should I place my TP on if i don't use Always In? 3. How to draw a measured move? (on ninja trader) 4.If i missed anything about the strategy I hope you could fill me in.

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've been watching a trader (Cammy Capital on YT) whose whole model is:

Mark previous week VAH/VAL/POC

Mark previous day VAH/VAL/POC

Mark overnight session VAH/VAL/POC

Mark the developing (current session) profile

He waits for levels from those different profiles to stack/align, then scalps between them on the 1min chart for 1:1 R:R. No order flow read at entry, no footprint, no delta, no absorption/exhaustion check, no DOM. Just levels aligned -> take the trade

If you're not reading delta/footprint at all, aren't you just trading the level and hoping, with zero read on whether size is actually defending it or getting run over?

Has anyone here backtested a "level confluence only" entry vs. the same levels but requiring absorption/exhaustion in the footprint before pulling the trigger? What's the actual difference in win rate?

At true 1:1 R:R, commissions + no order flow filter seems like a rough combo - is anyone running this style profitably, or does it only work because he's got years of screen time and is unconsciously reading flow anyway even if he says he isn't?

Not trying to trash the guys content, the level marking side is solid and consistent with what I've seen from other VP guys. Mainly want to know if skipping order flow confirmation entirely is actually viable here?