Day trading e-mini futures can be easy

Or at least, it does not have to be hard. Well, not all the time. As a matter of fact, I think it should be easy most of the time, which still does not mean always. I am not going to kid you that it should always be a dead cinch.

But I like to say that trading, day trading e-mini futures as well, can be as easy as you can make it. And so that you don't take me for yet another unashamed dream peddler, please allow me to elaborate.

In order to understand why day trading e-mini futures (and trading in general) can be easy, it's important to understand the reasons why it is not. That's because some of these reasons are plainly self-inflicted and not caused by some intrinsic difficulty that many people, beginners or wannabe traders in particular, ascribe to it.

This is not to say that trading can always be easy, because sometimes the market can indeed drive you crazy, but even then you can certainly make it easier on yourself if you don't let yourself sweat it too much. Maintaining the right composure in tough situations is important, so if you tend to act like a drama queen you should not be surprised that you are just making it worse. Moreover, acting like that is a sure way to make your difficulties only snowball eventually.

So why trading can be tough? Here are some basic reasons listed in no particular order.

1. you are not well prepared for the task, which means you did not practice long enough to feel comfortable doing it,

2. you don't have enough money to trade comfortably or the money you use for that is not something you can easily afford to lose and so even if you have done plenty of practice trading you still don't feel secure in your role of the trader,

3. you are trading too much, which means in a way that is not warranted by the market conditions, its volatility in particular (in low volatility it's better to stay put than to put on a risky position only to end up sweating it to no end),

4. you are following a poor (poorly tested or plainly untested) trading methodology, which sometimes is the result of, as I like to say, "repeating someone else's mantra," this someone else being, for instance, a homegrown guru on that trading forum for suckers and losers (and, sadly, most of them are like that),

5. you are conditioned to believe that things have to be tough, which again can be the result of long-term exposure to trading losers you hang out with (did I mention trading forums before by any chance?).

If you can eliminate these basic causes that make day trading unnecessarily challenging, there is no reason why most of your trading days should not be easy.

I also think it's easier, perhaps even much easier for your trading to become easy if you choose a discretionary style of trading, such as promoted by KING, my flagship vendor product. This is truly skill trading which allows you to progress as a trader. System trading may allow you to progress as a system developer, if you also develop your trading systems as opposed to merely utilizing them. You will not be making a great deal of progress as a trader by merely following the system calls, and the easiness of your trading will be determined solely by the system and not your skills that do not have the potential to grow over time in this case.

It is true, though, that to some, especially the beginners to day trading, system trading may seem easier than discretionary trading, but that's a very superficial ease, and the one that does not improve in time. You want to think long-term and you want to think about improving over time or else your time is not well spent.

Of course, as already alluded to above, don't expect your day trading, especially highly-leveraged e-mini trading, to become easy overnight. Practice is important, as I already mentioned (point 1 above), but I chose to remind you of it because this is really hard to overstate. And so is self-discipline, in general, which is why I could not avoid bringing up the issue of trading forums where too many wannabe traders tend to waste a lot of their time losing their focus of what's important. Finally, so is cultivating the right, positive attitude, so do make sure to surround yourself with the people who can help you rather than burden you with their own problems.