In Search of the Perfect Market to Trade

There are now hundreds of futures markets to trade. If you add stocks currencies, ETFs, options and others, there are thousands of markets to trade. Yet each market finds it's participants. Traders find a market that suits them and make it their "home", at least for the time that they try to master it and then as they earn a living from it. Some markets disappear after a time due to a myriad of reasons.


But what attracts people to a certain market? Each market has it's own "fingerprint" - the way it trades. The market that took me the longest to master was the DAX. It's now my favourite market. It's super volatile and takes no prisioners. I paid my dues and surely was the source of the money for a few traders to build their swimming pools. Since then, I've been able to pay for my own needs from that market at the cost of the traders trying to master it now. The DAX has the qualities I like: extreme volatility, lots of stops that are run, a good daily range, and large tick size. Others like it can be the Russell2k, Hang Seng and Light Crude.

Chart below is the Russel. I traded the DAX in the morning (London time) and switched to the Russel for RTH.