notouch

Breakouts are easiest to confirm if you trade a daily timeframe. A close above the breakout level and strength into the close would indicate follow through in the days to come. GBP/USD has just (this morning, London) broken above it's previous high so will make a interesting case study of the theory. Can it close strongly? If so, expect follow through.

If the first post you make is a link to some scammy managed account website, what do you expect but for it to be considered spam? This is a forum for discussion on trading not to discuss scammy "leave $100 with us and we'll make you $1 million" managed account websites. Regardless of whether it was spam or not (which I think it was) your post was out of place on this forum. Just my opinion - I'm just a humble poster.

weiwei, for your number one there will always be an opening price and premium divergence when there is a gap because the premium is just the difference between the future contract and the underlying index. Your number two sounds good because it shows that the future contract and underlying index are moving together so it's not just a temporary spike in the futures that's not followed through by the buying and selling of stocks in the underlying. For number three it makes sense that a program buy would happen at a top and a program sell would happen at a bottom because it shows there was an interest in buying/selling the futures but not the underlying stocks. The problem is that there are often program buys constantly triggering during up trends and program sells constantly triggering during down trends. Personally I don't use the premium at all. It's great for those who have the capital and technology to run arbitrage programs to buy and sell SPDRs but if you only trade futures there are better indicators to use.

Brownfan, how much do you really need EasyLanguage? Do you program your own unique indicators with it? If not I would choose Ensign over MultiCharts. There's so much functionality within Ensign that unless you really do have some unique indicators, you probably won't need to do any coding. Volume based charting is really Ensign's niche and they have some features not found elsewhere. Having tried out the various options I would say Ensign is the best charting program and eSignal is the best data provider. I found MultiCharts buggy and Investor/RT was the worst piece of software ever (on a Windows PC - I understand it was designed for the mac). Best idea would be to get a free trial of eSignal Premier and also a free trial of Ensign and MultiCharts then you can test them all out on eSignal data for free.

CL is better if you can afford it. The volume is higher and the costs lower but the margin is about double.

I definitely think it's better to follow different markets than to follow only one but I wouldn't put different positions on correlated markets e.g. one position on ES, one on YM, one on NQ and one on ER. Better to go all in to the market where you see the best signal that way managing your trade post execution is easier. I think it's far more beneficial to look at multiple non-correlated markets to spread your risk. I look at YM and ES, GBP/USD, EUR/USD and EUR/GBP and QM. I'm also looking to start trading FTSE again, DAX and ags.

Big volume came in at the 50 fib level in YM (daily chart) to buy it back up so I see another wave up if earnings are good. It's still a bull market.

I can't see the point personally. You mention slippage but fiddling around trying to put in different orders on different contracts is going to take time so you might lose out that way. I can't see how trading several different contracts would reduce the risk of slippage. As for the opportunity cost it could work both ways. You could see a great ES set up and then decide to trade YM and NQ too only to see ES outperform YM and NQ so you would have been better off just putting it all on ES.

I've observed DJ STOXX 50 and "random walk" was the phrase that sprung to mind on an intraday basis although on a daily basis it trends nicely. Because the underlying stocks are such a wide variety, different factors can pull it one way or the other. On the positive side the volume is a lot higher than any US stock index future. I've also traded the FTSE - mainly longer term swings and scalps off of UK economic data.

They're related markets but definitely not internals.

How could there be something like that? TICK and TRIN are specific to stock indices where the underlying is made up of many different stocks. Crude oil is just crude oil.

Yigal, you usually get a better response if you use the title to describe your post instead of just "If you have time for this" which could be anything. As for today's trading, your problem may be that you're seeing pivots as a Holy Grail but to be useful they have to be part of holistic approach to trading. Yesterday we had a very narrow trading range so the pivots were very close together - too close together to provide meaningful support. Breakouts often follow narrow ranges and this was especially likely today because of the FOMC minutes.

If you scalp for 5-10 ticks like Hubert then definitely tape reading is useful. For traders looking for larger intraday or multiday swings there are far better ways of reading price and volume.

You make a good point weiwei. There are 2 reasons why tape reading may not be very reliable. The first is that as weiwei says it can be manipulated. You just as often see large orders at the end or middle of a big move as you do at the beginning. Some big players may have limit orders below 12500 for example, sell just above 12500 and then absorb the stops that get triggered. The other problem is that there aren't that many big players who trade YM. Most people who tape read follow the methods of Hubert from TTM but according to him a large order is any order above 10. Medium sized retail traders can easily trade lots of 10-50. Just because an order is over 10 doesn't mean it's institutional. If you want to see what the big players are up to you need to look at the ES tape where it's not unusual to see 500 lots coming though (equivalent to 1000 YM contracts). So the trades highlighted by Yigal could just be a few retail traders.

I've never traded a pit-traded contract so I wouldn't know. I assume it's very different from an electronic contract.

These are pit only contracts so how do you expect your orders are going to go through?

We've reached that time of the year when no matter what your technical analysis is telling you, it's the fundamentals that determine the direction of the US stock indices. It kicks off today when the first DJIA component Alcoa announces it earnings, although it doesn't make it's announcement until the close so expect some overnight action tonight. If earnings are better than expected then YM gains, if worse than expected then YM loses. It's as simple as that. Of course in the coming weeks it's the performance of all 30 stocks and the wider stock exchange that determines direction but you'd be foolish to ignore the fundamentals.

I think the mini ags are pit only so it's unlikely TS provides a data feed. You can use esignal data with the old TradeStation 2000 I believe but not with the current version.

At least one pivot usually comes into play but they're not the holy grail. You need to look at other sources of support and resistance like previous highs/lows, fibs and value area levels.

Bonds and interest rate type contracts have massive liquidity - far higher than even ES.

That's my experience too dalby. Mypivots.com uses the 24 hour ECBOT session with the 1615 settle price as the close. Using the 1700 close is also an option. Definitely there are sometimes highs and lows in the electronic-only session that you don't want to exclude from your pivot calculations.

Remember CBOT is not the only exchange to offer ags. LIFFE offer coffee and cocoa, ICE offer orange juice and there's CME's livestock and pork bellies which I think is going electronic soon.

On mypivots.com they're using the official YM high, low and settle prices - nothing to do with the pit. Strictly speaking those are the "official" pivot levels but it means the YM pivot levels are out of line with the underlying index (the DJIA) because the NYSE was closed on Friday. For the weekly pivot I would definitely include Friday because there was trading following the important employment numbers. I doubt the daily pivots or MP levels will provide much support or resistance.

I also prefer the classic pivots but I can't see the logic of using the 0930-1615 hours. It doesn't correspond with YM, DJ or NYSE open hours. I think it's best to use either the official YM high, low and close (or settlement) from the CBOT website or use NYSE hours (0930-1600).

I was impressed by big volume coming in at the lows. Look particularly at the fakeout of the previous days lows which was accompanied by the big volume spike. I think the low volume was because of Passover and Easter holidays.