I have developed a method that is working well for me, using technical analysis and only regular trading hours bars. Does anyone have any advice about using after-hour bars also? I don't intend to trade after hours but am wondering if I would have better results using all of the trading bars. I use ESignal so I can adjust the hours/bars I use easily. Thanks in advance for any input you may have.
IMHO: It depends on your trading style. For example, if you are trading ES futures or oil futures, and your method is solely based on support and resistance, will you ignore bar patterns before the pit session, that form strong support/resistance ? I probably would not.
Generally speaking price action tends to "form up" better during RTH than AH. There are always exceptions of course. When I do watch AH I tend to use a bit longer time frame than during RTH.
I'm only talking about stocks... Unless the AH volume is insane (earnkgs, news), I find using it useless.
In my opinion, it depends on the instrument you`re trading. ES trades around the clock, but it`s not a true 24-hour market. What you`re really trading is stocks and the NYSE opening hours are 09:30-4:00. Because of that, I don`t really pay much attention to price action during AH at all, beyond being aware of it and plotting the high and low print. However, I do watch the pre-market in order to have an idea about where the market will open since where we open can reveal a great deal about what kind of day it will be. For other instruments, the overnight session may be of more importance, but I don`t really know any other instruments very well. If anyone disagrees, I`m always interested in learning, but this is how I currently see it. My two cents.
if you've got a profitable method using rth only, don't bother about the other hours the '24 hour' futures market does mean there are some large moves outside rth, but for me it's not possible to stay awake 24 hours 5 days a week to trade them there is tho a way of trading some of those hours with what I call a 'bedtime trade' entering a trade up until bedtime â if there's a B/S signal generated by ones method and closing the trade or letting it continue after one's up and in front of the monitor the next morning my Day-to-Days-to-Weeks trading method originated following the spot eurusd which is a true 24 hour mkt, and is based on analysis of the ah M W D 4H charts the spot euro futures contract is the 6E Euro FX which closes for one hour at 5pm est I also use the same method for the ES and include 60 15 min charts for the bedtime trade of both the 6E and ES but the method's a bit too much for intra/day trading, so I've just designed what I hope will be a profitable method for day trading that requires 'no' analysis, entering trades based on B/S arrows generated by an indicator on a 5 min chart, although I'll still do a full analysis of ah D 4H 60 15 5 charts before beginning to trade
Drawing trendlines is a subjective process. But I ***think*** I draw better trendlines by including the bars outside pit session. Happy thanksgiving to all !!!
If you believe that price action is primarily the result pf large active traders (as I do) then RTH should be the basis for your analysis. If you think the 2 am EST tics in ES count as much as the 9:45 am tics do (which I clearly don't) then you should go ETH. Obviously in 6E the London session is pat of RTH.
================= Exactly,Lucrum; low volume[irregular hours] by definition is not as accurate/helpful. Unless its your one house/RE that sold.LOL Small samples are never as helpful. If one is on the wrong side of an earnings report, irregular hours may help..... ==========================================
I appreciate all of your input I have spent a considerable amount of time this week using my indicators, first using just RTH bars, and then using both RTH and AH bars. Perhaps because my trading system is pretty much based on price movement (open, high, low, close), I have found that if I use only the RTH bars, it is not helpful at all for AH trading (which I do not do and don't plan to do at this point). It seems that it could actually get one into trouble. But if I do use the AH bars in conjunction with the RTH bars, it works really well to plan trades for AH ... however, it ruins the results for my usual RTH trading. It seems, thus far, that using just the AH bars is useless for any type of trading, at least using the system I've developed. So I will stick with using just the RTH data.