A well-defined trading plan can help traders stay focused and disciplined, helping reduce the risk of emotional decision-making. Your futures trading plan should include:
Technical analysis is the science of analyzing past price and volume data to identify trends and patterns that can help inform your trading decisions. Often the entries and exits of a futures trading plan are based on a trading strategy developed and tested using technical analysis. Once your strategy is defined, it becomes the foundation of your broader futures trading plan.
Typically, a trading strategy starts out with one or more indicators on a chart, and then trading rules develop into trade setups and triggers. NinjaTrader’s customizable trading charts include 100+ indicators and 10+ chart styles to help you identify and target trading opportunities.
Trading strategies can be tested on different timeframes and symbols. NinjaTrader’s high-performance backtesting engine allows you to simulate your trading strategies on historical data and analyze their past performance. Documenting your trades and reviewing results in a trade journal can help identify patterns, refine strategies, and improve discipline over time.
Ideally, trading strategies have risk management built into the trading rules and logic. NinjaTraders’s advanced trade management (ATM) protects open positions with automatically submitted stop and target orders and self-tightening trailing stops, which can help eliminate emotions from your trading.
Trading charts and technical indicators often help traders identify directional trends, support and resistance levels, and more.These tools help to inform potential trade setups and can serve as triggers to determine entry and exit points.
Traders will often look at technical indicators on a variety of bar intervals and historical periods in time to better understand the current price and volatility potential for a particular contract. Although technical analysis does not necessarily try to predict future prices, looking at historical data and understanding what has happened in the past can help equip traders to build trading rules and react to real-time price action more effectively.
Join our livestreams each weekday as we prepare, analyze and trade the futures markets in real-time using charting and analysis tools.
Learn to leverage technical analysis to target futures trading opportunities and identify trends using chart types, indicators and more.
Get started on your path to learn how to trade futures through our introductory video series outlining the first steps in your trading journey.
Opportunities to access NinjaTrader's simulated trading environment include: