What to Trade Continued

So, I did a little more reasearch (I think that's all I do) and found out about E-micro currency futures. Basically these are currency futures that are a tenth of the size of a normal currency contract. In the case of a EUR/USD contract, the size is 125,000 Euro, but the E-micro contract is only for 12,500 Euro. This means you only need a tenth of the margin to trade an E-micro contract.

The real benefit to these E-micro contracts is that they are cleared by the CME, and the brokers actually match your trade with other traders - the brokers are not taking the other side of your trades. Also of benefit is that the prices are transparent as they are marked to market every evening so there is a clear "standard" price, unlike the retail brokers who can essentially make up prices.

Naturally I was excited to find this. If you want to do Forex trading, E-micro futures are much better than retail trading. But there is somewhat of a drawback. My $100 bankroll is not enough to starting trading these contracts. The initial margin for a GBP/USD contract is $392. So unless I have several thousand dollars of capital, I can't effectively trade these futures. I could wait and demo/paper trade until I've saved up enough, but who wants to wait?

So my initial excitement has become disappointment. The E-micro currency futures are clearly the way to go, but without the capital I can't take advantage of it yet. So I've decided to still try to trade in the seedy retail world until I can do futures.

I'll be back with more system development stuff next time.