Advantages of Trading Futures vs. Stocks

One of the biggest challenges stock traders face every day is the inability to short stocks and ETFs easily and consistently. This is often caused by a shortage of available long positions at a supporting brokerage, which are needed to borrow those shares for a trader to enter a short position. With futures trading, you can enter short positions as well as long ones. Every future can be shorted for any number of contracts at any time. 

Futures provide exposure to a wide variety of financial markets and commodities that may otherwise be difficult to trade through individual stocks. In addition to major market indices like the E-mini S&P, Nasdaq, and Dow Jones, you can trade markets that affect our everyday lives like crude oil, gold and silver, bonds, coffee, and many others. 

If you want to trade where the action is, then look no further than futures trading in a global marketplace. Unlike stocks and ETFs, with limited trading hours and often limited trading volume, the primary futures markets are often highly liquid and tradable nearly 24 hours.