From the Inside Flap
When the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched the S&P 500 E-mini in 1997, their aim was to provide non-professionals with an opportunity to trade on an even footing with professional traders. Judging by the fact that the intervening years have seen a veritable boom of E-mini stock index trading worldwide, one can conclude that their experiment was a smashing success.
It's easy to see why E-mini trading has become so popular among day traders. First, there are the much lower margins associated with the smaller contract sizes, as compared to their floor-traded counterparts. Also, because trades are executed entirely electronically, there are no market makers or floor brokers. And, unlike commodities or standard futures, there is virtually no chance of manipulation, insider trading or any of the other problems that occasionally affect other financial markets. But along with its many advantages and abundant opportunities, E-mini trading brings an entirely new set of challenges and potential pitfalls that can bedevil the best laid plans of beginners and seasoned day traders alike.
Due to extreme leverage and the intense participation they receive, the stock index futures markets afford little time for traders to dwell on technical conditions. Intraday volatility in the stock indices is far more exaggerated than that reflected in the daily bar charts of other markets. And positioning techniques that have proven reliable in anticipating the actions of long-term trends in other instruments, fail miserably when applied to the countertrend reactions of the highly leveraged S&P futures contract within the shorter, intraday time frames.
Author Will Scheier draws upon his decades of experience as a highly successful day trader and trading educator to provide you with:
- A framework of Day Models for making sense of the chaos of the day trading environment
- Codified, easy-to-adapt trade entry setups
- Trading techniques that are anything but mechanical scalping
- Technical Trade Event Models and their rules
- Tools for spotting major intraday swing trends at the instant they begin
- Fresh insights to Old School and floor trader concepts like the Open Range, Taylor 3-day Cycle and classic pattern breakout filtering
- Archived performance record of real-time trade calls
Divided into four parts, the technical tools exposed in the first three parts are eventually brought together into a cohesive whole in Part Four. There, a special meaning is afforded to them when they arrive in the confluence of pattern, price and time. In addition, once the identity of completed trade entry models are established, Part Four of the book then includes the blueprint for creating a Trade Plan, and enumerates the rules necessary to conduct a business according to that Plan.
Engaging, informative, practical, this reliable resource will put you in a prime position to profit mightily in today's ever more volatile stock markets
M. WILLIAM SCHEIER is the owner and founder of ValhallaFutures.com. Will started his trading career as a stock and futures broker in the early 1980s, learning to trade his own account and advise his clients, while mentoring with a retiring cotton trader. He then trained on the floor of the CME's S&P pit. With the advent of electronic trading, Will shifted his focus to day trading stock index futures in the smaller time frames, transferring much of what he learned from floor traders onto the screen. He estimates that in his efforts to further his trading education, he spent more than twenty-thousand dollars on courses and materials vendors of technical analysis, but found little if anything useful for trading in the smaller time frames of the volatile stock index futures markets. Ultimately, he found success with his own, highly original analysis methods, which he now teaches in a live, ten-session webinar.
