Scalping FX vs Futures

Hi everyone at T2W!

This is my first thread at this forum, Ive been a member at FF for a couple of years but have now decided to venture out in to the wilderness a little. Quite a different forum here, interesting though.

My reason for starting this thread today is to ask for the opinions of any scalpers about the Pro's and Con's of scalping Futures compaired to FX.

Ill be a little more specific and tell you what kind of scalper I am as it seems the definition for scalper is different to many people. My scalping involves FX trades that last from seconds to afew minutes 95% of the time and Possitions are not allowed to move more than afew ticks in to the red before they are closed out, profits are taken depending on the currnt market, stalling price/a target/sign of reversal. A problem that I am see'ing over the past month or so is increased spreads ontop of commisions which is making the job much more difficult than I had antisipated.

A note to anyone who may want to try and tell me im foolish and refer me to some other kind of trading, please dont. This is the only kind of trading I want to do, if I cant do this, then I dont want to trade.

I hope I get some interesting responces.

Good trading, Leon

PS. Forgot to mention that I trade the Tick chart.

Leon

hi mate what broker are you using ?

Very tough to do and unless you have really fast system, co-location, IT infrastructure...

If you are a scalper you are wasting your time with FX, Futures is the way to go.

In futures you can trade 300-400 contracts on the ES without any slippage and a spread of 1 point. On the smaller futures contacts like FX futures, 20-30 contracts with no slippage.

Then there is comissions - consider that the average fx trade has 3 points of spread (more on some other pairs). That would be $30 commission to your forex broker, versus a $5 commission that you would pay to a futures broker for a trade. For scalping, the spread and commission is so important to your bottom line.

On the forums you will get some people who will bag futures, and talk about the billions of liquidity in forex. These people are just repeating forex marketing and really have no idea of the reality. The true interbank liquidity is only open to high net worth individuals. When it come to real liquidity that retail traders have access to, the futures exchanges cream spot FX.

And the most important point, there is no broker manipulation in futures, because all trading is done on a regulated exchange. Look for a broker that offers Zen-Fire trade execution technology. Supposedly very fast and great for scalping. Also make sure you have a fast internet connection 'ping time' wise.

I'm scalping FX spot successfully through IB, trades usually lasting from seconds to minutes. Sometimes I build positions which I hold 20-30 min at the most.

Spreads did increase this fall, but have been improving again.

Funny thing is, I always "looked down" upon FX trading and instead traded equities and futures - but what can I say, my P&L decided this was what I should be doing.

I use TNT for scalping but does anyone know about Emini Direct I saw it advertised on this forum and it looks really nice for futures scalpers - I usually trade Mini S*P

i am scalping both fx and futures but on CFDs which is 100 times better.

i prefer scalping fx cos of the liquidity and lower spreads.