Millionaire TradersQ: So you basically learned to win. The second year you obviously
started to have better profits, what happened next? You now have
two years under your belt as a day trader and obviously reached a
certain level of success. How do you discover stock index futures?
A: I was in a chat room, and one of the guys in there is always
commenting about trading futures. So I asked him in private if I
could call him and ask him why he did that, and I did. He said the
bottom line was if you go trade futures and you are successful at it,
you will never look back.
Q: Many of the equity day traders whom we’ve interviewed tell
us that stock index futures are where equity day traders go to die.
It’s the single most difficult market in the world to trade.
A: I think that it is by far the most difficult in the world to trade,
but somebody makes money at it.
Q: So he said once you get into futures, you’ll never go back. So
what happened then?
A: I started dabbling in both. I was trading two stocks and I traded
the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 futures. What was interesting is
that I was good at trading the S&P 500, and I typically would lose a
little money trading on the Nasdaq, so I stopped trading in Nasdaq
and started trading strictly the S&P 500. About three summers
ago, the volume in the ES (e-mini S&P 500) increased to such a
level that it didn’t want to move, which kind of lost its profitability.
So I started looking for something a little more volatile and the
ER [Authors’ note:ER is the futures instrument for the Russell
2000—an index of smaller capitalization companies that tends to
be much volatile than the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones index.] moves
about twice as much per day as the S&P 500. Which means you
either make money twice as fast or lose money twice as fast, right?