John Carter swing trades, and he has a pretty fat portfolio. But by swing trading he's able to look at several markets including forex, so when the main indexes are out of whack he can just go trade the USD and Euro - or wheat, whatever. I'm not promoting his website, this is just what I've gathered from watching him. The real question comes in what size of an account do you need to do longer swing trades? Certainly a smaller $20,000 account and one bad day you're out. But the reward side of that can be huge. For example one contract of CL and you hold it for a few dollars and you've pretty much made your month. And a $2 in CL is not hard to accomplish with the latest bull trend.
What about instead of the actual futures contracts themselves, what if you could swing trade the options?