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)
Any one knows what the institutional levels for futures are that the professionals use for trading? They can't be pivots or previous day/week OHLC since evryone has access to these numbers.
I don't have an exact answer for this but you can bet they do look at daily and weekly charts and know what your looking at and know where your likely to put your stops and take advantage of that frequently. I've heard that on some instruments the 20,50 and 200 day m.a. plays a role..beyond that I don't know
Platform: "I trade, therefore, I AM!"; Theme Song: "Atomic Dog!"
Trading: EMD, 6J, ZB
Posts: 795 since Oct 2009
out of curiousity, it might be interesting to ask, exactly what is your background in the trading arena?
most persons, sophisticated retail investors, never even comprehend that the markets are gamed, and casino'd,
certainly QA's know this, because their applied mathematical methods are doing just that, replacing investing with gambling and odds brokering.
its rare to find the two married in one person, such as myself, you, other commentators on this particular thread, and a few other select contributors on futures.io (formerly BMT)
To say the markets are "gamed" is completely absurd and shows no understanding of what is meant by the term. Computers aren't even powerful enough to deal with the game tree of heads up no limit holdem, let alone anything even close to a double auction market with an unknowable number of participants.
There is no point in talking about levels as if there is one strategy that is being implemented. Even the greenest retail trader has multiple strategies and prices that cause him to react if he is conscious of it or not.
Fulcrum trader uses cumulative delta to find significant levels of resting inventory so i suppose you could look in that direction to find what levels big players are likely to use to conduct some business.
JS Product Overview sells some pivot levels which may be act as key areas to for doing business.
You still can trade effectively from an intraday perspective without knowing any of these numbers in advance as price action exhibits some typical patterns around these numbers anyway. If you know ahead of time that 1300 is an institutional level on the ES what will you do more with this information that you could not do without it ? Unless you use these numbers to put resting orders there ahead of time i don't see why you would want to focus your attention on these numbers. New levels are created every day.
Broker: Advantage, Trading Technologies, OptionsCity, IQ Feed
Trading: CL, NG
Posts: 1,038 since Jul 2010
Thanks Given: 1,713
Thanks Received: 3,863
The term "Institutional" is very broad which can be broken down into many sub-levels such as Commercial Hedgers, Hedge Funds, Pension Funds, Mutual Funds (yes, they do use futures), etc., etc.
Having been on the "institutional" side for my entire career, I can tell you that there's no common indicator between them as many have different objectives and styles in managing money. I will tell you my firm often used the simple moving averages of 10, 20, 50, 100, 150 and 200 and on the daily chart interval in addition to some other proprietary tools as a basis of evaluating over all market trend. Also, for intra-day analysis, the VWAP is a highly regarded indicator that is used.
The markets are indeed gamed. The survival of liquidity providers hinges on their ability to do this. I am not sure why software needs to be involved - that is a separate issue.
Some people fall into the camp of markets being pure and mathematical. Enter Goldman Sachs. Unlimited funds, unlimited risk. People like this make money every day from the markets. It's a transfer of money from retail traders to professional traders. When it is so blindingly obvious to you, me, everybody where Joe Retail has his stops - the question has to be - why WOULDN'T someone game the system if they had sufficient funds?
Do you think there's a 'semi-secret' set of numbers that 'professionals' club together and watch. Do you think that knowing these numbers would suddenly make you profitable?