I believe the european and uk spreadbet and cfd accounts have protection against going negative. Your liability is restricted to your account. I think this became law following the swiss thing...

You can always follow the futures charts/volumes/orderflows but place orders with spreadbet/cfd. I believe differences are quite small nowadays.
(I've never had a spreadbet a/c so thats the limit of my knowledge...)

Hello dmr1,
They say $500 account minimum..And $50 margin for day trading.
I always wanted to trade futures (and stay away from forex and all the things about brokers ,that sometimes they trade against you) and have ''direct access ''to the exchange but E MINIS was too big for me.
Since i discovered Micros I think it is a good idea (having 1/10 of the risk) to make a start with real money and see how it goes..And from my research in internet they talk about Micros as an opportunity for small investors to make a start with less capital
Tell me your opinion

First, just think about the leverage here. $50 margin to hold a $17,400 instrument. 435x leverage! A small 1% change in price wipes out 17.4% of your $1000 account.

In one 60 minute bar, lately there was been about a 50 point range average in each bar. That is $100, or 10% of your account. That means you could easily lose 10% in an hour.

And sometimes during the corona news, it was more like $400-$600 range in a 60 minute bar, not to mention the lock limit situations were you could not exit bad trades at all for a while.

The biggest risk to a new trader is blowing out the account because of small account size.

I think micros are good for getting your feet wet. I would not be doing it right now, given the market's volatility.

Personally, I'd wait 6 months, or until volatility goes back to early January levels.

In the meantime, spend your time refining your trading approach AND getting some capital to trade. Think about how much more confident you'll be after 6 months of preparation, and having a larger stake to survive drawdowns.

It sucks to wait, for sure. But you are considering starting trading during a really wild time in the markets... I know many experienced traders that have temporarily walked away, until things settle down.