Shout It Loud

Emini futures, which are less formally known as eminis, are small contracts composed of “full-grown” contracts in normal futures. One difference between stocks, which have always been traded on the floors of the exchanges, eminis always have been traded via electronic means, leveling the playing field for home based traders so that there is no advantages for institutional traders who are right on the floor.

You can defiantly make money in this way, I as an example, am one such person who has done so. I think I’ve got a pretty good view of things, following my trading of stocks intraday for the past decade, there is some great news for people interested in starting up a career or hobby in amini trading. Listen, folks: it is now much easier to make progress towards your ambitious goal of becoming a consistently profitable trader than it was when I was a rookie. This has much, if not most, to do with technology, one very useful and important element of which are easily available trading simulators that these days render trading conditions in a respectably realistic way.

There are quite a few good simulators for emini trading currently available to emini traders, the best of them being probably NinjaTrader. The best feature that NinjaTrader has compared to other stock programs is that it can be used with almost all the emini future brokers out there. What’s really nice about this simulator is that it gives you a very comprehensive statistics of your performance, such as the number of losing trades, the number of winning trades, the average profit per trade, the average loss per trade, the percentage of winning and losing trades plus a host of other, even more complex characteristics that could be of particular use to those working on their mechanical emini trading systems. It’s simple, the premise is you try to learn how to trade eminis in a simulated environment until you master that, and then you can move on to make your real money with the same software.

One should however be aware that simulated trading of eminis, or any other trading vehicle, for that matter, is not exactly the same as live trading of these instruments. Possibly the most important element of trading is however missing, or at least diminished, in simulated trading. Of course that lacking element is emotional attachment to money.