Thanks for sharing the experience you had at Bear Stearns. Would you also consider making another thread containing other stories from your time there? The pro trading world is quite interesting to me. I've only been able to learn about it through the teachers of courses I'm taking but I am always curious to learn more from those who've had first hand experience.

As for trading one market or more, right now I'm finding I do best with just one. I definitely think expansion is possible with more experience and discipline, but right now I'm finding I start to overlook important things or wrongly just assume certain conditions are holding when my attention has to be split between multiple markets.

Professional traders are, in almost all cases, very specialized in a narrow area (I know, because I traded professionally for many years). The better you know your product, the more likely you are to find an edge (whatever it may be). Every product is different and unless you are on top of all the fine details you will never make money. Once you have proven that you can make money in one product, you can diversify and go wherever the best opportunity is. But until then, and for most people that is years down the road from when you start, stick to one product, and try to make one set-up/approach work. It's very difficult and most people are never able to make this happen.

The mistake many retail traders do is to go from product to product, platform to platform, indicator to indicator... constantly looking for that "secret sauce". The only way to become profitable is to focus really hard on one thing. Its tedious and boring. But trading isn't supposed to be fun. Treat it as a business, not a hobby, and think of it as a puzzle. Don't give up until you have either solved it or feel confident you cannot do it. At that point you can move on to a different approach or decide trading isn't for you.

When I first started with trading I was just on the equities side scanning for stocks. I moved to futures within a few months of that and have pretty much exclusively scalped and day traded the ES and MES since then. I do look at correlated and inversely correlated markets, particularly in the premarket to get a sense of whether the overall market is more risk on or risk off but that is relatively a small part of what I do.

I know of some prop traders who trade large intraday positions and trade a few different instruments simultaneously, paying a lot of attention to correlations and inverse correlations particularly around geopolitical events. I personally just structure trades based on where the market is in the spectrum between extreme trend and extreme trading range and adapt to the market conditions rather than looking for very specific setups or events. There's plenty of opportunities right in the ES and MES throughout the session so I don't look at other things. I make my decisions based on market generated information and want to minimize potential distractions as much as possible. If I were looking to hold for longer periods of time then I'd diversify to a greater extent (probably emphasizing equities and ETFs over futures for overnight positions), likely incorporate some fundamental analysis, and apply hedging strategies when appropriate.

Please excuse my ignorance as this is my first day here and I'm only about two weeks into seriously studying futures (ES specifically), but why trade ES and MES? Is there a reason beyond the contract costs that I'm not aware of? Thank you!