After practicing on the simulator and you start trading with real money, I suggest that you start with just 1 Micro E-mini contract on the S&P 500 (You will type MES into the top left of your TradingView chart to find this). It is important to have enough margin. I suggest a starting deposit of $500, so you have plenty of margin. $300 would probably be sufficient also, but the less you have starting out, the more tension it is if you lose some, since the percentage of your account is more greatly affected.
WHAT HOURS TO TRADE
Any time of day is good to practice on a demo account. But when you begin trading with real money, I highly recommend that you skip the first 30 minutes and the last 30 minutes of the stock market regular hours — which are 9:30 am to 4 pm Eastern Time (6:30 am to 1:00 pm Pacific time). These market hours are almost always quite volatile and move very fast, so it easy to lose money quickly. In these fast times it can be quite complicated. It may be best to trade when the market is a little slower for the first few months. There is a nice pop, usually up, when the market opens in the afternoon (3 Pacific, 6 Eastern) on Sunday through Thursday (which is after the one hour no-trading break on Monday through Thursday).
It is very important to learn the usual patterns for a particular time period and then get good at trading that time period. This is one of the biggest secrets to becoming profitable more quickly. The opening pop, as I just wrote about above is somewhat predictable, though Sunday usually has the largest pop and is most often in the upward direction. Another predictable time is the last five to ten minutes before the market closes. The market often makes a significant move up in the last one to two minutes, and then often up again at about five minutes after the market close. It is risky to trade the opening pop, but the pattern after the pop is quite consistent and safer. If it pops up, then it will usually come down about half way within ten seconds to three minutes and then starts to move back in the original pop direction.
USING STOPS AND MAKING MONEY
In a volatile market you will lose money fast if you don’t have a larger stop, like about 8 to 25 ticks, so I don’t advise trading the first 30 minutes of the market with real money for about six months. In general I recommend that you use a stop of about 6 to 8, and don’t get in a trade unless it is going in the direction that you want to go. When the price action is very slow, you can use a smaller stop loss, like about 3 to 8 ticks. Futures trading is much different than trading stocks. If you were trading stocks, the large stop may not make sense. But if you have a tight stop in a volatile futures market, the market will swing up and down and quickly take your money by hitting your stop and closing out your trade. The stop also depends on your strategy and what the market is doing. However, if you get your win ratio up to about 80% using the demo, and then keep it high, and don’t take any large losses, you will likely be able to make money. By “large losses,” I mean the losses that happen when someone forgets to place a stop loss, or moves the stop loss, so that the loss becomes excessive. Don’t do it. In the beginning, if you set a take profit at just 3 to 6 ticks, it will help your win rate. It is much easier to get 3 to 6 ticks than it is to get 8 to 12 ticks, so I suggest that you just go for the smaller tick wins, which are always much better than a loss. But, soon you will want to let some of your winners keep going to collect a few more ticks. In micros, a win of 4 ticks is worth $5, which will be more than four times the cost of commission, which at the time of this writing is less than a dollar for a round trip on broker Amp Global, but significantly more on NinjaTrader at $1.44 for the round trip. See the pricing comparison chart. Later, when you have a consistent pattern of winning, you can more micros per entry. After 5 micros, it is best to move to one mini, which is valued at $50 for every 4 ticks, because the commission cost for 5 micros is $4.20, which is the same as trading one full contract.
HOW DOES THIS MARGIN STUFF WORK?
So, there is some major money to be made (or lost, though hopefully not often lost), especially if you play several lots (or contracts) at once. With three lots at once, a 4 tick win is $150 minus commission costs, and this trade usually takes 30 seconds to two minutes. But, just so you know, in order to trade with 3 lots at Amp, you will need a minimum of $1200 in your account to cover the margin requirements, or $1500 in your account at NinjaTrader where the margin requirements are currently higher. To trade one micro at Amp you need only $40 for the margin requirement ($50 at NinjaTrader), at the time of this writing. Of course it is better to have more, because if you lose your first trade you will not be able to trade again until you deposit more than the minimum margin requirement. It is also important to have more than the minimum margin so that you don’t get taken out of your position from insufficient margin in the not so unlikely event that the trade moves down a little before it goes back in your favor. For example, if you have just $40 in your Amp trading account, you can trade one micro, but if you get into a trade that goes down $20, you will get taken out of your trade for insufficient margin at some point on the way down, most likely somewhere before the account reaches zero, but usually at about 50% of the required margin, even though they say that you will get taken out of the trade if you go below 80% of the required margin.