if you go to future months of NQ there is no investor interest in owning the contracts. it's like a contract exist for daytrading and swing trading only. like a a buckets shop. the contracts don't own any stock or own any QQQ or SPY which the ES and NQ follows. It's because a lot of ETF have closed and there market ETF is mostly es and nq futures. A lot investment bank firms have close their market etf, bond etf, and commodity etf due to lack of investor interest and all of them use derivatives like commodity etf or futures, they don't own the individual stocks. they own the ETF like QQQ or ES or NQ so if you have so many ETF closing...naturally volume decreasees. besides most individuals don't need the liquidity or size. you need too much margin just to trade one contract of ES..you are actually better off trading stocks between $10-$20 if you have less tha n $5,000 in cash to trade . if stocks were not $2000/share for amazon. trading ES is only for people with $1,000,000 accounts. as individual stocks don't have the liquidity to daytrade one million dollars. or $800/share for teslae etc. but for daytrading you need $30,000 because if you drop below $25,000 you lose your daytrading privilleges. and if you have like $3000,,you are better off trading penny stocks. under $1.
This happens to many other futures like Germany Dax, gold, crude oil, India Nifty .... This Big Players ' Treading lightly ' issue has been there for the past few weeks. When price moved from one level to another level, volume needed to move that much has been reduced by 2 or 3 times. If your chart is volume based, the effect is obvious ; you ended up with very long candlesticks. I am sure you will notice this even with time based chart. India Nifty was interesting. Its bid offer spread increased from around 1 to 2 ticks to around 10 to 15 ticks !!!! It has since cooled down. Interestingly, there is not much change to the daily volume. And what did the exchanges and brokers do ? They increased the margin by many many times. Because of this issue, my trading stop loss, volume chart volumes, quantity traded , trading parameters .... have to be adjusted.
Also, it may have some other 'hidden' volume. For example, I see /NG spread trading has much bigger volume than outright /NG contract.
You think so? I think if the price is tanking then yes, it's possible. 1000 lots in five minutes could be possible. 5000....may be in one hour