http://www.wisdomtrading.com/global-futures-markets reads: Exchange: BMD (MDEX) Product: Crude Palm Oil Contract specific: Crude Palm Oil futures Size: 25 Unit: tonnes Months: All 12 months The problem is that "all 12 months" are not traded. It is spot month, the next 5 succeeding months, and thereafter, alternate months up to 24 months forward.
Just transferred my account to Wisdom. Tradestation denied the transfer for a reason they won't give me, then agreed to do it and then "forgot" it was supposed to go through and made them send the transfer paperwork a second time. Unreal -- makes me very glad my money is out of there. Regarding Wisdom, they seem to be very similar to Tradestation's Futures 4.0 platform. They offer all the same markets (supposedly they offer some others but I have not tried to trade those yet). They offer several connectivity options including API access which I plan to avail myself of later. Wisdom also allows access to trade using the RJO WebOE platform (website) so you don't need to use the RJOVantage application (and therefore don't need to pay for real-time data which I didn't use and didn't want but was forced to pay anyway). Not sure what you guys are getting at with the "all 12 months" thing. The "All 12 months" listing refers to which contract months are live for that contract. At any given time generally only 1-2 will be actively traded. I've been trading all 12 months of both Malaysian Palm Oil and Japanese Rubber on TOCOM for years, but of course only 1-2 months are active at a given time. I'd be concerned if they didn't offer a month that was traded but to be honest I've never seen a broker not offer all traded months of a contract. I'll also add these restrictions to only trade N months out are not a function of Wisdom but come from RJO -- I ran into price restrictions in the past with Tradestation when commodities were surging and Tradestation had to get RJO to increase the price ranges.
I'm surprised there is global interest in a minor contract like crude palm oil, the volume has certainly picked up since it joined the CME platform. Active month is currently May, the third month. The way it works is that most trades are "rollover" on the 16th of every month, other months are being traded but not as active. On an average day, volume is 15-20k for 3rd month, 6-8k for 4th month, 4k for 5th, 3k for 6th month. There is a lot of spread interest in other months too, so it wouldn't be too difficult for anyone to enter/exit any months within the 2nd to 6th month series.
"interest in a minor contract like crude palm oil" - Is it too small for the hugeee hedge fund you manage^^ ? Sorry to tease you but it doesn't make sense for me because I dont care much if its a "minor market" or not. I think I better like small markets because I feel it can be easier to make money on it.
@SideShowBob Thanks for the information. Could you confirm me that you can also trade SAFEX, BM&F and Euronext options on Wisdom ? Did you have any sucess on your past trades on both rubber and palm oi ?
All those are listed on their rate sheet but I haven't tried trading them so I can't be 100% sure. Email them -- they responded to me within a few hours. They really went above and beyond to get the account transfer going. You'd think two brokers both using RJO for backend would be easy, but you'd be wrong....
Glad you are making money from this contract, retail interest has dried up pretty much due to manipulation. Actually I'm glad that more foreign interest are coming into our market, cpo was never in the league of the grains until after '07 and Dalian's palm olein was introduced and it still hasn't match up to bean oil's depth and breadth. Is the volume too small for us? ahem....we may think so cuz we are part of a group that contributes 35% of its daily volume, more is always better.
35 % of daily volume ! I understant better what you said ! I would like to trade palm oil because I am mainly a spreader and so I need more markets to get spreads. How can you trade Dalian ? Do you have a chinese firm ? There is a lot of retail there ! Even retail is smaller and smaller on shares and on Euronext commodity markets retail/farmer is so small. Its only cash trader and market makers/hedge funds guy.
I almost finished to apply to RJO and I can say that its such a pain. They ask so much useless things, you loose so much time. IB win easy against this expensive and old school broker. But they have a lot of markets^^