January 2012
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
16h 41m
English
CHAPTER 12
Markets
Price action techniques work in all markets, but most day traders prefer markets that have many entries a day on the 5 minute chart and can handle large position sizes without slippage. The 5 minute Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Emini futures contract can handle any order size that an individual trader can place; you will never outgrow it. The Russell futures contract, however, is popular with some individual traders because they feel that it trends well intraday and the margin is relatively small for the size of the average swing. Most successful individual traders eventually want to trade more contracts than the Russell can handle without the worry of slippage.
When starting out, you should consider trading the SPY instead of the Emini. If the Emini is trading around 1,100, the SPY will be around 110.00 and an eight-tick scalp for two points in the Emini is a 20 cent scalp in the SPY (each Emini tick is two and a half times larger than an SPY tick). One Emini is equivalent to 500 SPY. If you trade 300 to 500 SPY, you can scale out of your swing position and not incur too much risk. One advantage of the SPY is that the 20 cent scalp size feels so small and comes so quickly that it will be easier to place orders for swing trades than for scalps, which is a better approach when just starting out. You will notice that the SPY often hits a one-tick entry or exit stop when the Emini does not. Because of this, some traders use a two- or three-tick stop in the SPY.
Once ...
