Day trading futures and how to become a master of your trading strategy?

Mastering day trading futures is an article for people who have failed at futures trading. You know who you are? You are undoubtfully just like I got sucked into the promise of making money in a few hours. I fell so deep down the rabbit hole that I was waking up at 3 AM every morning just to trade the European open. I started off using a ton of lagging technical indicators, and I was trying a ton of tips and methods that I found in books and seminars: we are talking early nineties here.

Day trading futuresAfter six months of doing this, I lost my shirt. My account was empty, and I was depressed. For me day trading futures was a game that I had to win. Like any addict, I reloaded my account and promised myself to stick to one method. I also pledged to use good money management because half of your success as a trader is dependent on how you manage risk. Guys who use too much leverage go broke, and guys who trade to large go broke. At this point, I was not using any indicators because all indicators are lagging and can only tell you what happened in the past.

Mastering day trading futures with nothingness 

The best day trading futures strategy is to use an empty chart. Have you ever looked at moving averages in the past tense and saw how everything makes so much sense? Well, in real time those moving averages are useless and can only tell you where the price has been and not where it will go. Although I was making better choices with how I managed my money, I still wasn't a good trader. Even with these changes, I was just a slight loser. My problem was that I was still a discretionary trader who was trading on two small of a time frame. This is a problem that many traders face, they get into futures to TRADE and their detriment, small time frames allow them to make many trades. 

All newbies fall in love with some form of short-term trading, which is hard to master. In all honesty, short-term trading and day trading is not something that most traders can successfully do. It's a big boys game. The big boys have all the level 2 tools where they can see an order book and see when the big money comes into the market. You and I don't have that on our retail accounts. For the novice and losing intermediate trader, a strategy that uses a larger time, with a minimum 5-minute time frame gives the most opportunity to earn money. 

You have to kill that desire to TRADE and replace it with the desire to make money. When trading on a larger time frame, there will be fewer trades to make, and that equates to fewer opportunities to make mistakes. I didn't start making money until I started focusing on the 5-minute and daily charts. I made trades only once or twice a day and comeback hours later to see how things are going. I sometimes close trades in several minutes and sometimes I let these trades ride for a few hours. I am finally a successful day trading futures trader.

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