What are the best markets for day trading?

There are many different futures markets to trade as a day trader. The most common is the E-mini S&P. It is one of the most liquid contracts in the world and is traded almost 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. Intraday spreads on the E-mini S&P can be as low as $300, which is crazy. However, there are many other day-traded futures contracts. There are US Treasury bond futures and notes, the 30-year bond and the 10-year note. There are currency futures, the Japanese yen, the Eurocurrency and the Australian dollar. Commodities also have large enough intraday ranges that you can get a decent number of ticks during the trading day. Crude oil can easily range to $2 allowing you to make decent profits. Even grains, like wheat, have good intraday trending moves. 1 tick on wheat is equal to 1 tick on the E-mini S&P and you don’t have to spend all day fighting HFT black boxes trying to fake the market. Where there are 1,500 lots on sale and 2,500 lots on sale. The bid is then reduced to 250 lots and bid for 2500 lots.

What you need to keep in mind as a day trader is that you are in and out during the day for a few ticks or even a few checks if you have a good broker, so you need a market that has the ability to have good intraday moves. and enough liquidity to make it easy to get out. The reality is that most futures markets are liquid enough to trade intraday. You have to find one that you are comfortable with in terms of intraday moves and how wild the market can get. Beans can go to the limit. Stock indices can have flashes, where they move 10 handles in the blink of an eye, like the collapse of Twitter when fake news from a hacked AP Twitter account said the capital had been bombed. Energies may be subject to news that you will not have access to for minutes after the market absorbs it. You won’t know if there’s a pipeline explosion until long after commercial operators know about it. Of course, these are not everyday occurrences, but each market has its own bumps that need to be considered when trading.

Another thing to consider when selecting a market for day trading is the trading hours. If we go back in time when there was a bang-open trading floor, there was a set opening and closing time each trading day. Now with all the electronic markets they are open 24 hours. However, the markets have times of the day when most of the trading occurs. This is commonly known as cash hours. For stocks, it is the trading hours when the stock market is open. For currencies, metals and bonds it is a bit different as those markets have cash hours in Asia, Europe and the US, but generally traders will use the 8am-2pm time zone as the most liquid time in the respective time zone. The grains are a bit different. Traders use the above floor hours as the most liquid trading hours of the day for grains.

If I had to make a list of the best day futures markets for day trading, it would be (in no particular order): E-mini SP, E-mini Nasdaq, mini dow, mini Russell, 30-year bonds, 10 years. notes, crude oil, corn, wheat, soybeans, gold and silver.