Hi All,
Anyone have any experience trading Emini s& P during regular trading hours....I was wondering how is the liquidity for small time traders (4 to 5 contracts at a time).
Any input would be appreciated.
Thanks!
AP

apmodeler 

Hi All, Anyone have any experience trading Emini s& P during regular trading hours....I was wondering how is the liquidity for small time traders (4 to 5 contracts at a time). Any input would be appreciated. Thanks! AP

Thread title says after hours, thread body says regular hours... which is it?

Either way, 5 contracts at a time will be zero problem.

Mike

ooops! Sorry BigMike!
I meant after hours....regular trading hours do not seem to have a liquidity problem.

apmodeler 

ooops! Sorry BigMike! I meant after hours....regular trading hours do not seem to have a liquidity problem.

After hours trading is the domain for those trading OPM (other people's money) or a trading desk that has been deemed "systemically important".

Whatever platform you're using deploy your "market depth" application and check it at midnight or in the very early a.m. You'll see that the bid/ask doesn't move and more importantly, the number of contracts isn't moving either.

If you have a long position, all it will take is one Israeli cruise missile going into downtown Tehran . . . .

I don't know who's money is in play after hours, but know traders who enter positions
After the hours. I did the same thing recently, because the ES was trading below the low of the prior day.
Statistically there was very little chance of it opening there. I did very well on the trade.

Missiles, earthquakes, strokes and what not can always mess a trade up. Therefore, I use stops.

Depends what you mean by after hours because that stretches right to the open the next morning.

The 'dead spot' is the time between the US close and the Asian opens. At that point there's no institutions in the world open as far as I know.

Then when the Asian markets open, it 'livens' up - but 'liven' is quite relative. Sydney opens at 10:00am Sydney time which is 8pm EST. Osaka opens at 9:00am Japan time, which is also 8pm EST.

I'm 2 hours behind Japan, so this is about as early as I see it. There is activity and it will often turn off common levels - yesterdays VAL/VAH, yesterdays hi/low to the tick. You can enter trades at this time with a lot less risk because it's so slow.

There is no real lack of liquidity. If there was, it'd be a lot more volatile. You could trade 20-30 contracts without an real worries of major slippage.

The problem as I see it would be needing to trade. A lot of times, there will be nothing on, so if you feel you need to take a trade each session, I think you'd run into trouble.