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My main motivation for writing is to hold myself accountable, but your post identifies my secondary motivation for taking the time to record my adventures.
I hope to memorialize the true account of an amateur becoming a successful trader and in the process, help others to have the courage to go for it too.
Perhaps it will end up being the story of abject failure and violent screams as I go down in flames; but I am doing my best to make it something worth singing about.
save your money the CME has micro contracts trade MNS MES trade those if your completely new to futures these combines offer no real advantage for someone trying to learn to trade. Unless you are able to get funded to learn use micro contracts you can get started for less than what you would loss on combines.
Caacapital, I think your observation is spot on. 100% truth. Five stars to you good sir.
I have been hoping for these micro contracts for about 10 years now, and I am excited they are finally here. I just started trading them last week on a $1000 Amp account. So far so good.
Not all brokers have the pricing down to the level of Amp ($.74 RT in the literature, but really $.78) or Ninja ($.82 RT). OEC says the FCM hasn't lowered the fees to them yet (say what???). But most traders should now have access to index trading at a margin level that is safe for beginners.
I really appreciated FuturesTrader71's webinar. It really opened my eyes
If someone can't put $1000 into an account and start trading micros, then for sure they can't afford the $2000 to $5000 (my estimate) that most people will spend on the combine/evaluation mill at TST/OneUp/LeeLoo (all the ones I have tried). If these had come out two years ago, then I probably would not have spent the thousands I have on the evaluations.
If fact, I have been encouraging the traders in my chat room who fail an evaluation or live account with MES to go to the micros. I will do more of this on my posts here. I have not been trying to position MES as the answer to the questions of the universe, but just post my personal journey.
Nevertheless, I DO have a brand new $150k MES account to begin trading this very morning, and I will do my best and keep posting my results here.
But I will also do my best with my new "micro account" on Amp. Does this deserve a new journal? No--too much work, but I guess the race has just begun between my two accounts. I want both of them to succeed. And I can show the results of both here.
As I wrote the last post, I believe now that most traders should probably NOW use the new gift from Heaven called "The Micros" instead of getting on the combine treadmill.
However, based on my conversations with a couple great traders in our new chat room, I think that TST, OneUp, LeeLoo, and Earn2Trade (and others) DO have a place in the world--
I think they are great for experienced traders who want to get "FREE" money. Even if they pay 20% split, after a relatively small initial investment of $200 to $500 (depending on the size of the new account), they have 6 to 20+ contracts to trade with.
After siphoning off profits for safety, these types of accounts can continue to be great while things grow. And as long as we are careful to not mix up our accounts, as happened to one trader in our room last week (he accidentally broke a rule on his MES live account thinking it was another account), then all should be fine.
1. Volume. Because MES doesn't want people just sitting there doing nothing, I now have to trade at least 50% of the volume during the evaluation. So I have to trade at least 6 trades per day, but this is easy, because I am using the same style and am currently at 10 trades/day.
What if you want to take a vacation or have something come up?
It isn't getting through the evaluation that concerns me. It's the vagueness of the rules in print. Nowhere does it say that you have to make a minimum amount of trades a day or week on the rules. It pretty much goes against everything I have learned about trading. While I am an active trader, I think the rules are little more than land mines designed to boot you out. At least that's the impression I'm getting.
All of these companies have a minimum trade requirement listed somewhere on their sites. the only reason i can think of is to get you to fail. Thought they will say its to get an accurate sample of your trading skill but none of the funding time frames support this get funded in 15 days is the main selling point so thats counter to getting a true sample of skill.
I'm going to finish the free trial and opened a futures account at TS to trade the Micro ES. I may give the evaluation a try at some point in time in the future. (No pun intended) Didn't mean to highjack your thread. Looking forward to your continued postings.
MES has told me that they have had traders who have qualified, started to trade, and then just let the account lie dormant. They needed a rule to protect themselves from this scenario. And "50% of the average trade count per week" seems extremely reasonable to me.
To prove the point, I asked MES this very question during my trial,
"I have a question regarding the minimum average number of trades to take per week to stay in compliance. I am asking because during the recent market volatility, I took a lot of trades. I want to reduce the number of REQUIRED trades on my live account.
What is considered a "trade"? Is a trade counted as just ONE trade, even if it has four contracts? Or is that considered FOUR trades for accounting purposes?
I would really like it if you said that I could trade 10 contracts per day instead of 10 trades per day (for example)!"
They replied,
"Scaling in and out counts as multiple trades. If you buy and sell in one shot as described above it would be one trade. Please keep in mind these rules are never really hard for anyone that is trading somewhat normal and we are very lenient with it. Like nearly all of our rules, they had to be enforced because people would try and take advantage of the situation or quit trading after being close to their draw downs without letting us know."
So there you have it. If you are reasonable, MES will be reasonable too.