Hi @KM7731548
What is the cause of this difficulty? Trading short timeframes does not suit everyone but it does have some benefits, too. Have you found this too difficult to do profitably or does it just not suit your circumstances?
Rather than just plodding through lots of screens for all the various currency combinations, I think a lot of traders seek some kind of strong/weak analysis to select the pairs most likely to be trending against each other.
As an example there is a very long-running active thread on this site doing just that, you might like to take a look at it:
Buying options should not be a problem as the risk is defined and limited to the premium paid (as you know, of course) but I can imagine brokers being vigilant about clients just selling options in order to gain from time decay. But there are many sophisticated structures with options which can utilise short and long option combinations with different strike prices and expiry dates, etc to tailor exposure risk and profit potential. I am sure you have already explored this avenue?
Futures are a high risk instrument and I can understand the due diligence requirement in vetting clients.
Are you based in the US? If so, I don’t think you can trade CFD’s there, which I would guess most of us Europeans use. They are clean, cheap and easy to use for both long and short term trading. They are ideal for intraday trading with both short and long positions. I guess there are alternatives in the US but I am not familiar with them. So I suspect that futures would be the core instrument for trading commodities and indices in this way.
Many people think that and I think they are wrong, at least from a trading perspective. It is a belief based on the idea that in the long term the global economies just grow and grow and share prices with it. And I guess that has been the case if you measure change over decades. But from a trading perspective there are often periods of deep reversals in stock prices that provide excellent speculative opportunities from short positions rather than just sitting and waiting a few years for values to return to their earlier levels before moving higher. Take a look at this weekly chart for SP500:
From a long term investment point of view, such as a pension fund, a buy and hold is understandable, but those areas (years!) in the rectangles, show there are many big opportunities in both directions for the retail trader.
Even a look at the daily movements over the last 6 months shows the opportunities from the sell side:
These are just some ideas to maybe help you explore some avenues for diversification and offering a little more challenge to your trading! 