So What's New?

It's been a while since I posted anything on my blog, and I thought it's time for a new update.

In my last post, I mentioned that I have been looking for other markets to trade other than the US 30-year T-Bond futures (ZB).

Two futures contracts I have been recently looking at are the DOW E-mini futures (YM) and Russell 2000 futures (ER2). I have been doing some simulated trading on these 2 contracts, and I have to say I like them better than ZB, and even ES or NQ (that's the e-mini SP500 and Nasdaq100 futures contracts, respectively). They just trend better and at least for my trading style, allow me to actually practice active trade management, i.e., moving stop to breakeven, and trailing my stops once the position has moved in my favour. These markets just trend better than the ES and NQ, and while the ZB does trend, it does it so painfully slow. Mind you, I haven't looked at the ZB again since I switched to YM and ER2.

For the last month, I have been trading the ER2 more than the YM, just a personal preference, because of the bigger moves in terms of dollars. The YM has a minimum tick of 1.00 point at $5.00/tick; while the ER2 has a minimum tick of 0.10 at $10.00/tick, with 10 ticks = 1 point or $100.00.

The following shows how "trend-y" the ER2 is:


Note that my charting program has "AB" for Russell2000,
but for our purposes we'll call it ER2, as that is what
its more generally known symbol is.

This is a screenshot of one of my trading systems. It colors the bars green when the system is bullish, and red if bearish.

In this chart, the ER2 moved at least 60 ticks (6 points) or $600.00! It would move about 20 ticks before pausing, then would surge up again for another 20 ticks, and it did this 3 times within the time shown in this chart alone. It just leaves ZB in the dust! (sorry ZB traders, that's reality)

These are the types of markets that traders love. This market moves fast and quick when it decides to move, sometimes my charts don't update as fast as this market moves. But I like the trendiness of this market and personally, I think we have a winner. This is now my primary market for trading.

Any other ER2 traders out there, I'd love to hear from you.