My back-tested trading approach involves trading both stocks and futures.
Some people prefer not to trade futures, perhaps because they involve more legwork than stocks, or because their brokerage doesn't offer futures trading, or because they're more complicated than stocks. Whatever the reason, it's no problem at all and there are ways to follow my futures trades without trading actual futures contracts.
First it helps to understand that the MES futures I trade are almost directly correlated with the S&P 500 (SPX). With that being the case, a person could instead trade an equity that also almost directly correlates with the S&P 500 and be able to effectively follow my futures trades by trading a "stock equivalent".
So when I post my MES futures trades, I also simultaneously post the equivalent trade using the ticker SPXL. If you trade SPXL, you are not trading futures. You can trade that ticker with a normal stock account. It tracks the S&P 500 just like the MES futures do.
There are tradeoffs to buying SPXL instead of MES futures. With the SPXL you get the benefit of it being a stock, but it uses up more buying power than MES futures (even if you're using a margin account). The MES futures are a leveraged trading instrument that lets you control more potential profit (and loss) with less capital. Not only that, but I typically take on bigger position sizes with my MES futures trades than I do with my stock trades.
How might this impact you? There are a couple of ways:
1) Imagine that you see me post an MES futures trade, you buy SPXL shares to follow the trade, and you use the position sizing calculation published on the website. If the trade reaches its profit target you are going to make less than me from a percentage perspective. Stock trades involve a 1% risk per trade whereas many of my futures trades are up to 4% risk. That means both a profit and a loss will be a lower magnitude if you follow the trade using the SPXL ticker using my position sizing approach.
2) Imagine that you are following all my stock trades. And then a futures trade gets posted, and you buy the stock equivalent to follow the trade (SPXL). Now imagine one more futures trade gets posted. It's possible you might not have the buying power to be able to follow that trade with SPXL, because the SPXL position might use more buying power than the futures position.
One more item worth pointing out: I am posting the SPXL equivalent on the site, but I'm not actually trading it in my account. So the entry price I post isn't an "actual" price, and these trades won't show up on my statements or in the returns I publish on the website. In addition, in some cases it's possible that with my futures trade an exit gets triggered, but with the stock equivalent SPXL the same exit might not get simultaneously trigger. They both track the S&P 500, but it doesn't mean they are perfectly linked together. They're really close though.
So there are tradeoffs there to consider. Overall, for people who prefer not to trade futures, this at least gives them a way to utilize spare purchasing power to follow trades that have a back-tested edge, whether they are able to earn as much as me on the trades or not. You won't be able to directly match my performance with these trades, but they give you another way to put spare purchasing power to work.
If you have any questions about this, you can contact me any time.