ATR and Pivot Points

[TinGull]

Welcome to TL! Out of curiousity, how do you know the floor pivots are different? Also...eminis aren't traded on any floor. It's purely electronic. The YM follows those pivots with real accuracy, and ER usually gives a little leeway to them. No idea about NQ or ES as I've never put a contract into either of those markets.

Love to know what kind of differences you see. If you have a chart or a formula with how floor traders are calculating them, let us know

[ezduzzit]

Hmmmm.. to my knowledge there is no major difference and I doubt many retail traders have access to any new pivot schemes used by floor traders on trading the parent instruments on which the e-minis are designed. There is of course opportunity for occasional meaningful differences in one person's pivot calcs versus those of another depending on whether or not they include the globex overnight sessions into their numbers, but most often there are not wide swings in the thinly traded overnight sessions.

I suppose there are also those who use the variable pivot calculations that adjust every 60 minutes based upon trading levels within that same day, but I don't find many traders using those.

Since the minis, as pointed out just above, don't trade on a live floor exchange, I don't see why you would want to get hold of those "floor" pivots and substitute them for use on your e-mini charts.

Many traders don't even bother with those old calculations and use market profile or volume profile levels or just simple dual purpose trendlines which run through the high activity points of support and resistance over the prior two or three trading days or periods.

As usual, there's a little something for everybody, depending on their style of trading, but support and resistance is fairly obvious on prior day's charts and I think it is less important exactly how you come up with it than it is to see if those points are often respected in your current day's trading.

Happy Trading

[Sniper]

Pardon me if I am playing devil's advocate here. But here I go

Yes there's a difference between timing on the floor and trading electronic. But is so little you won't even notice. Maybe a floor trader is 1 tick high or low from an electronic pivot but in my calculations (as I did when the e-mini's craze started around 2001) the deviation was around .005%.

If somebody is out selling a " floor pivot point signal" service I will be cautious on that.

My two micro cents