traderandreas 

Thanks for the response. I was under the impression that the new micro fx futures had great liquidity and was an attempt to take buisness from the spot forex brokers. In light of the poor liquidity of the micros, why would you trade it? thanks, Traderandreas

If you think 6EM0 is going to 1.40, but can't handle the -200 pip swings (that's $2500 per contract) on the way there, then M6E is the way to go.

Unless you are going for 40+ ticks ( or pips) don't waste your time for the Micro FX. Spread is too high most of the time.

I'm going for more than that,,, let's see how it works side by side with 6E. See my journal and find out how I do...

kareem40 

Unless you are going for 40+ ticks ( or pips) don't waste your time for the Micro FX. Spread is too high most of the time.

OK, so some evidence as to liquidity and pricing for 6E vs M6E. In the two charts you can see the best bid and ask in each 1minuter period. Chart one has bids in the upper panel and asks in the lower. Chart two overlays all four data series.

One minute was as far as I could drill down. Ninja wouldn't load bid/ask data under a one minute time frame. As you can see the M6E follows 6E fairly closely. Lowest bids and highest offers tend to be around max 3 pips away from the bigs, close to one during active sessions, and averaging about 2.

What does this mean. It means if you are using market orders you can expect to lose say 3 pips per round trip, assuming you are not always executing when the max difference is available. I have watched the prices about a year ago and often they are the same. So, say for market orders your cost is average 3 pips per trade.

It also means, and this might be interesting if you are a programmer, that the people making liquidity are taking on aveage 1.5 pips off every buy and sell made in this market. M6E is averaging about 11,000 contracts per day, so if somebody is arbing them in HF against the bigs, that's 1650 free full size lot pips somebody is making every day. If you want to compete maybe you can tighten up the prices and get inside theirs and make yourself 1500pips. Note to self. Time to become a programmer and get into HFT.

What does this mean for my trading. Perhaps it means being more patient on entries by using limit entries. My T1 is 20 pips, so that's a limit order, no worries there. And I may have to a little quicker getting my runner out.

Ok, so I'm convinced that I can execute M6E and have better chances than running through some online broker.

I got the snagit for 30 days ZTR!

To see more analysis of M6E liquidity vs 6E see the link to post 29 of my journal.

SYX Journal Looking at the comparison of 6e vs m6e bid/ask data over 50 days I found about 10 bad spikes ranging from 20 to 50 fifty pips. Most of them occur during the Asian session. There is also a huge spike everyday at the rollerover so you won't want to …

What have you found are good timeframes to trade 6E. I use 220T, 1m and 5m charts...

I know everybody declared the M6E dead, but I just gave it a try and is not too bad.
My son finished college and I was looking for something really small to start him on, so I traded M6E for the last month. Here is my report, would love to hear from others before I push my son in the pool.

IB, TS and Esignal charge $2 R/T (approx). TOS charges $5 R/T.
The margin is approx $600.
I don't think NT/ZF carries the M6E, if anyone knows if ZF offers M6E please let me know.
I tried it with IB using Braket trader and a little bit of IB's Book trader. (pls don't ask me my opinion of Book trader, lol)
IB does not allow you to set the stop loss using market orders before 9:30 am. After 9:30 am till 4 pm you can use bracket orders without issues. That was a problem for me since I like to trade Euro from 8 am EST.
There is a consistent slippage of at least 3 ticks during normal trading hours and much more around news. Since the tick is worth $1.25, the slippage is not a big issue if your R/R is at least 2:1.
You cannot scalp this for obvious reasons but I took only trades where I expected to make at least 35/40 ticks using 15 ticks initial stop stop and I had a profitable month. I traded all in all out, moving the stop to b/e after a favorable excursion of 20 ticks. Basically was taking sessions H and L and significant DT/DB's.
I traded looking at a 6E chart with the following two sessions: 3 am to 8 am, and 8 am to 4 pm, all EST.
Hope it helps all the other fathers out there.

I'm glad you are trading with your son, I think that is great

I looked at my broker and they offer M6E for $432 overnight margin and $200 intraday margin, which is a lot less than the full sized 6E. It could be good for overnight swing trades for this reason of the reduced overnight margin.

E-micro - EUR/USD (M6E) Commissions | Velocity Futures

The commission is $1.66 per round turn, compared to $4.54 for full size, so that will help make up for the slippage.

Mike

Thank you Mike.
I guess x-trader free is $2.56 R/T?
So one could use x-trader as a front end and feed the NT charts with x-trader feed?
Do you know if x-trader works with WXP home or a mac?

meyer99 

Thank you Mike. I guess x-trader free is $2.56 R/T? So one could use x-trader as a front end and feed the NT charts with x-trader feed? Do you know if x-trader works with WXP home or a mac?

There is an X_Trader thread here:

X-Trader Trading Platform This morning I've started my two week trial of X-Trader. I'm looking to eliminate NT entirely. For months, I've used MultiCharts to chart and NT for DOM only, but I'd like to remove NT because it still causes me problems every now and …

But briefly, yes you can use X_Trader to execute (DOM) and another platform like NT for charting. The charting would be from TT_FIX data feed. On Velocity's site you can click the other tabs, like TT_FIX, to get the commission price for other platforms. TT FIX is the least expensive because there are no platform fees "covered" or "bundled" with it by Velocity, it's basically a "bring your own platform" price.

X_Trader is Windows only, you'd have to run it under Fusion or similar if you want to run it under OS X.

X_Trader is a pretty high-end advanced product, probably not a good match for your son. I'd recommend something simpler, like the NT DOM, or Sierra Chart DOM if you don't like NinjaTrader. MultiCharts also has a good DOM, and they offer a free version of their platform you can use to trade live with called MultiCharts Discretionary Trader.

All of the above would work with Velocity if you want to use them.

Mike