Get More Bang for Your Buck With E-Minis

Conventional buy-and-hold stock investing is not working in today’s market. Trading E-Minis is a great alternative, because you can take full advantage of the market’s volatility.

You can easily make money in a market that is going up or down. You can, for example, make a bundle if you go “long” or buy an E-Mini contract and the market goes up. And if you go “short” or sell an E-Mini contract, you can just as easily make money when the market goes down. This adds an entirely new dimension of opportunity for investors.

An E-Mini is an electronically traded futures contract on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) that represents a smaller version of a standard futures contract. E-Mini contracts are available on the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, S&P MidCap 400, and Russell 2000 indices. One example: The E-Mini S&P 500 futures contract is one-fifth the size of the standard S&P 500 futures contract.

E-Minis have a low margin requirement, which makes trading them easy and affordable. You can get started for as little as $500 per contract. And because standard stock and index options currently have high premiums due to market volatility, your leverage and profit potential is higher with E-Minis.

E-Minis allow investors with small amounts of risk capital to participate in the Dow and S&P 500 at a fraction of the cost of purchasing the actual stocks outright. You would have to pay thousands of dollars in commissions alone to buy all the stocks in the S&P 500, for example. But by buying an E-Mini S&P 500 futures contract, you can participate in all those stocks for a commission of less than $10!

Bottom line: Start trading E-Minis if you’re looking for an exciting, highly versatile, efficient, and economical way to capitalize on the daily swings in the stock market.

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