Learn to Day-Trade the E-mini S&P 500: Simple-as-123
Marshall J. Jones · 1999 · 96 pages
A retired printing-company owner's home-brew method for day-trading the E-mini S&P: watch the Dow and Nasdaq for sync, then follow the S&P. The vendor it's built around, the broker minimums, and the chat rooms it leans on all stopped existing decades ago.
The one idea
The core idea, which the author calls Simple-as-123, is that the E-mini S&P 500 tends to follow the Dow and the Nasdaq when those two are moving in the same direction. Jones calls the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500 his three 'indicators' even though he admits they aren't indicators in the technical sense, just other markets he watches on CNBC and on quote.com's live charts. When the Dow and Nasdaq are in sync (trending the same way, even if by different point amounts) he treats that as momentum and looks for an entry on the E-mini.
The book pairs this with a second, unrelated method reprinted in full from an anonymous retired floor trader who goes by 'Snake-Eye': trade off a 5-minute E-mini bar relative to an 8 and 10 period moving average, confirmed by a Nasdaq candle chart and a 15-minute trend chart. Jones presents this as a bonus system to compare against his own, admits it's 'very similar,' and offers no real reconciliation between the two.
Both methods are wrapped in a third layer, a reprinted magazine article on 14 intraday 'time zones' (red, yellow, green) meant to flag when reversals are statistically more likely. None of the three pieces were built by testing; they're pattern observations the author or the reprinted authors noticed while watching a screen.
What it actually teaches
Jones's own version of the method, as he actually trades it, comes down to five steps.
WAIT OUT THE OPEN
Do not trade the first half hour (9:30 to roughly 10:00 ET) unless you already see a clear gap trade or the Dow and Nasdaq moving 'like a rocket' together. Let the market settle first.
WATCH FOR DOW/NASDAQ SYNC
Check the Dow and Nasdaq point changes (shown as CNBC's on-screen arrows or on quote.com). His example entry point is the Dow at +25 and the Nasdaq at +15, both still moving the same direction. They do not need to match in magnitude, just direction and momentum.
SIZE THE STOP TO THE BAR RANGE
He uses a mental stop loss (Globex did not support real stop orders on the E-mini in this era) of about $100, or roughly 2 points on one contract. He says to look at how many points a typical 5-minute bar spans and give the trade at least that much room, rather than using a fixed 2-3 point stop that gets hit by normal noise.
TARGET FOUR POINTS
His stated daily target is $200 per contract, which at $50 per E-mini point is 4 points. He trades multiple contracts to scale that up (his example: four contracts for an $800 day) and will scale out, selling part of the position if the Dow starts to reverse against the trade even while the other indicators still favor it.
GO FLAT EVERY DAY
No overnight positions, no exceptions stated. He also flags a recurring 'lunch hour time zone' problem: expect a reversal or chop between roughly 11:15 and 2:15, and he says most traders would eliminate half their bad trades by simply not trading that window. He also says to be out of positions about an hour before the 4:15 ET close.
What it looks like Monday morning
There isn't a real Monday-morning action here, because the method's own on-ramp is to paper-trade the E-mini for 60-90 days on quote.com's live chart feed, at $9.95 a month, in a platform that closed years ago. A reader in 2026 has to substitute a modern charting platform (TradingView, ThinkorSwim) with a Dow index, a Nasdaq (COMPX) index, and an E-mini S&P chart side by side, replicate the 8/10-period moving average and 5-minute-bar setup from the Snake-Eye chapter, and then just watch, unassisted, since none of the described tools (the streaming Time/Price/Info window, the specific broker list, the Paltalk chat room) exist anymore.
The realistic first move is smaller: read the time-zone table (the red/yellow/green reversal windows through the trading day) and cross-check it against how the actual E-mini or S&P e-mini futures have behaved recently, since that table is the one piece of the book that is a testable, dated claim rather than a personal habit description.
Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard.Fritz R. S. Dressler, quoted in Marshall J. Jones, Learn to Day-Trade the E-mini S&P 500
Where it fails
- The manual is admittedly unfinished. Page 84 lists topics 'I still have to write about yet': charts, abbreviations, an index, a useful-websites list, an action plan checklist, a chapter on narrow sideways channels, and a chapter on power trading. Several of those (charts, index, checklist) never appear anywhere else in the 96 pages either. A reader is buying a draft, not a finished book.
- Half the content isn't the author's method. The 'Putting Time on Your Side' chapter is a reprinted article credited to Barry and Ryan Watkins, and the entire Snake-Eye Trading Method (roughly 8 pages, arguably the most concrete trading rules in the book) is reprinted from an anonymous retired floor trader Jones does not name. Jones's own contribution is a loose momentum-sync idea plus commentary; the specific, mechanical rules belong to other people's writeups he pasted in.
- The entire infrastructure it depends on is gone. Live charts on quote.com at $9.95/month, Globex's stop-limit-only order handling for E-mini stops as described, minimum-$1,000 accounts at www.proedgeonline.com, and Paltalk chat-room mentoring were all specific to 2000-2002 and no longer exist in that form. The book gives no fallback for how any of its instructions map onto a modern broker or platform.
- No backtest, no track record, no drawdown numbers. The only performance claim is anecdotal: 'I did not have a losing trade for over a year when I first started,' which he immediately qualifies by saying it worked 'during the big Bull Run in the late 90's' and that later, in more volatile conditions, it 'took patience and discipline and a bigger drawdown.' There is no win rate, no equity curve, and no out-of-sample period tested. The one honest data point in the book (that the edge showed up in a straight bull run and degraded once volatility rose) is buried in the preface and never revisited.
- The core signal is explicitly subjective. The momentum chapter opens by admitting 'this is the most difficult part of this method to understand, and it's also very subjective. I cannot make it mechanical.' There is no threshold for how much Dow/Nasdaq divergence counts as 'in sync' or how much momentum is 'enough'; the reader is told they'll 'get the gist of it after watching the market for a few days,' which is not a rule, it's an invitation to hindsight bias.
- Every example in the book is a winner. The worked walkthroughs (the Dow +25/Nasdaq +15 entry, the Dow +90/Nasdaq -30 power trade, the gap-fill trade) all resolve in the trader's favor in the text. There is no worked example of a stopped-out loss, a whipsaw, or a day where sync signals failed, despite the author's own admission elsewhere that 'there are days when the market will go against you.'
Who it is for
Buy it if
You collect obscure early-2000s day-trading pamphlets for historical interest, or you specifically want to read the reprinted Snake-Eye moving-average method and time-zone table as raw source material to rebuild and test yourself with modern tools. It is not worth buying to learn a method to trade as written.
Skip it if
You want a system you can actually run today. The broker, the charting service, the order-routing description, and the chat-room support network are all defunct, the author's own track record is one bull-market year with no later verification, and a third of the manual is other people's uncredited-to-the-cover-author work stapled in.
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