Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I have been away on summer break for a bit. I will answer the questions that are still open during this evening's market prep.
In the meantime, please feel free to join the free daily Trader Bite that starts at 9:00 AM Eastern US time every day as a way to verify or gain a different perspective on the market. I have been doing these daily as a public service for almost 5 years now.
Here's where you can see today's:
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
For CL, you must be cognizant of the fact that you are trading a global, physically delivered product whose trading books floats around the planet continuously 6 days a week. For that reason, there is no real RTH for CL. There are some more active hours vs less active ones just like for the Euro, Gold, etc.
I like to contrast the full session versus the NYMEX pit session (9 am to 2:30 EDT), but really that is not necessary. I simply do this because that's when I trade it and it is the most active time for that product.
If you are trading futures, I would urge you to consider a different platform. TS, IB, ToS are good platforms for investing but not so for trading futures, in my opinion. I suggest allocating some money to a direct market access broker.
Continuous data is important so you can draw a reasonable comparison through the expiration period. A good data feed should be able to handle that for you. I use IQFeed.
I hope that answers your questions.
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
Convergent Trading's Phase 1 program is all about community interaction for serious career professional traders for just the purpose you are inquiring about. It is set up as a virtual set of prop rooms for market sectors via chat with continuous weekly live study halls, etc.
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
The FESX and FDAX used to be a lot simpler when they opened with the cash markets before 2006 or so. Now, there is a pre-cash hour that muddies up the waters. For IB, I would use the first 2 hours of the futures open as opposed to the usual first hour. Remember, the purpose of the Initial Balance (IB) is to capture the time in which many of the biggest participants get their business done for the day. So now, that takes 2 hours in FESX/FDAX/FDXM so that's what I set it to.
As far as opening swing, I would wait and market it for the cash open from about 3 AM Eastern time onward. The opening swing doesn't have a time limit. You are simply looking for a clear test up and down and you are marking those extremes. It is ideal that the high and low that you mark cross the opening price, but not necessary on days where the market has a strong bias in one direction.
Volume profile is time-independent and that is why I like using it. I use a full session profile. However, I have a chart that only covers the cash session from 3 AM to 11:30 AM Eastern US that I refer to when doing homework.
I hope that helps clarify things.
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
Sorry I'm getting to this so late.The webinars on FuturesTrader71.com have been taken down. I have been building much more comprehensive and updated material through the Study Halls at Convergent Trading and so didn't want people to keep going to the old material. It is all still relevant, but the new stuff is much more detailed and is presented with better examples.
Additionally, I'm putting together a series for those wanting a fundamental introduction and process for learning Volume Profile which will be available in the next few weeks hopefully. That is also through Convergent Trading. CT is where my focus is and that is why I mention it often.
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
With regards to M6E trade durations, depending on context, I'm looking at 15 min to 1 hr per trade as it has become a slow product and we are in the middle of summer right now.
I don't trade spot forex. I know many do, but I don't trust a market where the matching entity is my own broker who can trade against me, can see my orders and positions. To me spot forex is a bit of a wild-wild west sort of setup. I only trade it in futures because the exchange simply matches my trades with anyone around the globe. There is no interest from them in making money above and beyond the transaction fees they get. Futures are much more regulated and I trust my money at an FCM much more so then a forex dealer. These are just my opinions based on my experiences.
I would use and chart the 6E contract and execute on the M6E. I wouldn't rely on M6E volume as an indication of the auction. They are pretty well arbitraged, so pricing doesn't move away all that much (except when it is slow to a halt).
Best of luck!
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
There is no way to know. The goal is not to estimate when you should stop. The goal is to remain focused on the story the market is saying in price and volume and then to stop when you see nothing setting up. There is a consistency to the market's behavior but there are random outcomes and inconsistency on how much the market will yield on any given day. This is why we measure expectancy weekly and overall performance monthly, etc.
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread
Excellent work. However, let's put my comment into the context of what we are trying to do. If I wanted a 95% confidence interval for an unknown outcome in statistics, then I have to keep pushing the sample size higher and higher to attempt to capture as much of the population and skewness as possible. That is not the goal here. I'm not saying that you are falling for this trap, but many traders do in that they try to eliminate the uncertainty through further study which is akin to curve-fitting (and we know how curve-fitting works in real life).
So instead, I aim to get enough data to know that "hey...this has a pretty good edge". I don't know how much of an edge and will never know because the data set is continuous given the nature of the market, but I know that it is ENOUGH for me to spend time testing it. Then I figure out how much I'm willing to stake in terms of cash losses to exploit that edge in the market. This becomes my "edge stop" of say $5000 lost on this with 50 samples minimum and I will stop trading it. If I find that in 50 samples, I can make money, then I start pushing size on it and applying trade management to enhance it as best as I can.
Technically, a 200 sample test of a clearly identified edge is plenty enough for what we do with a reasonable confidence interval. The market varies all the time in small increments (barring disasters like 9/11 or housing bubble). So our goal is to expend just enough effort to see if we can exploit a probability for a period of time. We are not looking to do something as dramatic as deciding the probability of a population dying as a result of a new drug being released, etc. I know I'm saying the same thing over and over, but the intent is for you not to get lost in the usual attempt to eliminate uncertainty.
And like your last statement says, you need just enough to build a risk plan around it so you can trade it while reasonably minimizing your risk of ruin.
I hope that makes sense.
Risk Disclaimer: Trading Futures is not suitable for all investors. Past Performance is not indicative of future results.
If you have any questions about the products or services provided, please send me a Private Message or use the futures.io " Ask Me Anything" thread