Trading Simulators Can Be A Useful Way To Learn Emini Options
Friday, March 13th, 2009Emini futures, or simply eminis, are smaller-sized contracts of “full-grown” futures contracts that have been around for decades. Unlike the latter that have been traded on physical exchanges, eminis have always been traded electronically, allowing retail traders with access to the Internet to compete against institutional traders from the comfort of their homes or home based offices.
Success in this field is certainly possible and this author, if he may say so, is one example of this. 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. A lot of this has to do with the advances in technology, because the trading simulators are so advanced now that they can demonstrate the conditions of the markets in a fairly 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. NinjaTrader also allows you to trade live, so once you have mastered trading eminis in a simulated environment, you can use the very same platform for trading them for real.
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. There is a major element that is lacking in simulated trading of emini futures. Of course that lacking element is emotional attachment to money.