Louis, Yes, you should have more. I was very lucky when I started with $5000. Since I trade gold futures, I need $2400 deposit per contract. Therefore, one large loss of $3000 and I wouldn't have enough to buy another contract. With my trading program, I had a backtest downdraw of over $9000. I was using EOD stats and trading. I would never let that happen. I like to have at least $10000 per contract traded. Now, I am trading 2 contracts with $36000 in my account.
I have only traded Gold and Silver contracts so I don't know about others. I only traded a Silver a few times. Gold is very volatile with swings of $20 in an hour occuring too often. Tom ----- Original Message ----- From: Louis P. To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 5:24 PM Subject: Re: [amibroker] Futures or stocks? Hi, You are right; I forgot Forex in my choices. Ton: You said you started with 5000$; that was enough for trading future.. I read somewhere that one needed more money for futures than for stocks. Is it right? Thanks, Louis 2008/8/1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Louis, I would say that futures are the most profitable, but they are also very volatile. With futures, that anything under 15 minutes gets you too many trades in and out of the market. I like to use longer time frames. I am not very experienced in futures, but I have made and lost a lot of money. However, in all my futures trading over the last 2 years, I have more than quadrupled my investment. See my post under your last post "Anyone actually making money? ". I am looking at forex, but I don't know anything about it. I would just stick with gold futures, but I think that if I start trading more than 5 contracts, it may cause a problem because I only have a trading window of one minute on each of my 3 trading periods. Tom ----- Original Message ----- From: Louis P. To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 2:51 PM Subject: [amibroker] Futures or stocks? Hi group, The last thread which I started really helped me to realize a lot of things, one of them is that Brian is right when he says I am sipping the soup on a lot of tables but never stay for the meal. I'd like change that. I would like to concentrate on a particular kind of market (actions or futures) and a particular timeframe (1-minute, 5-minute, 15-minute, 1-hour, daily,etc). I know I may get zillions of different responses, but what do you consider to be the more promising? I've read that more and more people consider futures are the future (haha!) because of the high volatility and trading opportunities. Is this true? If yes, how much money do I need to trade them? I've heard you need a lot! And do I need to be there watching for 24 hours a day? And what about stocks and ETF? I'd like to read some people opinion about what they consider to be the most promising way... Of course, I won't start threads like this every two days! ;-) I'm just really thinking about this all and am tired to switch markets, timeframe, strategies, plans, all the time. I'd like to choose something and stay with it. But I want to choose what's most promising! Thanks! Louis
