[calamitychris]

I was curious if anyone else uses the index charts for trading futures? I recently started looking to the futures chart for indicators and realized that the index chart is much more reliable (in my trading approach)

I started thinking about it conceptually and a few questions arose:

1. Does the futures market drive the market index or is the futures market simply reactionary to the market index? If it is the latter, then the market index is the source that drives the futures so then it would make sense to look at it for indicators.

2. If one only trades during market hours 0930-1600 EST, would it not make more sense to trade a chart that only records that activity. It would seem that a futures chart would be more unreliable because it combines both volatility(market hours) and non-volatility(after hours).