Hi Folks.

First, let me say that I owe several of you an email response as a follow-up to your recent replies to my question "Are you using NinjaTrader?".  I have been battling a lung infection for the last 5 weeks and it flared up about a day after I mailed out, and has been seriously interfering with my ability to get any work done.  But I'm back at it tonight and hope to have everyone caught up before I go to bed.

The reason for my curiosity about who is using NT and how was two-fold.

First, NT8 Beta was released today into the hands of 50 super-traders who are expected to tear it apart and look for bugs and suggest improvements.  Once the Beta stage is complete, according to my sources, the fine folks at NT are planning to offer NT8 free of charge to Forex brokers to offer instead of or in addition to the MT4.  Having used both platforms for a while now, I can assure you that NinjaTrader is a far superior platform to MT4 in almost every way imaginable.  The only drawback to this point was it was a paid platform, so most Forex traders stuck with the free MT4.

If your broker offers NT8 as an option in the near future, I strongly recommend you give it a try.

My second reason for asking is that I have been spending a lot of time over the last few months getting an indicator and trading method designed for the E-minis (and especially the ES chart) ready for market.  I was honestly surprised to find so many of you were already using NT7 (or possibly an earlier version) and were already trading the futures market.

What I put together relies on the NT7 Renko charts, with various brick settings depending on the vehicle you are trading.  It can work on regular candlestick charts, but it is nowhere near as effective.

If you would like to take a look at it, here is the link:  http://crushtheemini.com/wp/info

If you have never tried trading futures, you are really missing out on some fairly simple and straightforward trading.  The futures charts, particularly the ES, remind me very much of the charts I used to trade back in 2006 and 2007 when price action was both aggressive and predictable.  It takes a bit more money to trade futures than it does to open a Forex account, and that may be a stumbling block to many of you.

But if you have the funds, you might find trading the ES chart (S&P 500 E-mini) for an hour each morning at market open (9:30 a.m. eastern time) you'll make more in 60 minutes with futures than you do trading London and New York trading Forex pairs.    

So take a few minutes to investigate trading E-minis if you have not done so already.  You might find it is the trading vehicle you have been looking for.

Jeff