At some point, yes - I'm quite interested in them thanks to @bone (once you get a taste for derivatives, it's hard to go back.) But not for quite a while yet; I want to get really familiar and competent with the instrument itself - futures - before I get to anything more complex. Having said that, I've already done a bit of options on futures - have an iron condor in CL right now, which is (or can be thought of as) a pair of intramarket spreads. However, what's missing here is the key element of spread trading in futures: I'm not looking at correlation or cointegration. It's just a standard iron condor - a 1SD bet on vol overstatement - albeit one with somewhat less counterparty risk than equities and a nice R/R ratio, and doesn't actually require understanding much of anything about futures or futures spreads. In fact... now that I think about it, given how attractive SPAN margin and other efficiencies in futures sound, I'm going to keep doing that. Most likely, I'll run some ICs, flys, and maybe verticals just to see how they do. (Oddly, my brain seems to file all of the above in the "options" bucket - no relation to the "futures" bucket at all. Probably something about the chart trading aspect of the latter, which is absent/irrelevant to the former.)
Raw beginner. Working at getting the basics down solid, but have already done a couple of hundred trades in sim. Also, still going through the initial setup process; e.g., I need a couple of different sim accounts so I can a) try new stuff to discover what works/makes sense and b) develop a steady routine so I can start generating meaningful metrics. TradeStation doesn't allow you to set up more than one, so I've submitted an application to AMP... As to instruments - about 90% of all my trades so far have been in CL, which for some reason feels more comprehensible to me than, say, NQ or GC. I have no way to explain it, except for being relatively consistent with it (up almost $3k at this point, with good risk management.) I was, however, strongly struck by @sstheo's point about MYM: using micros as a smooth progression in growing your risk tolerance. That's powerful, and seems like the most important thing I can learn right now. Even with the stops that I use ($100), I know that three or more losses in a row would make me start second-guessing my intuition - and that's not something I can afford in my trading. So, despite the strong pull of "I can make money in CL!", I'm going to set it aside for now and try my best to learn YM.
For the life of me the multipliers of futures contracts confuses me. I still don’t understand why bonds are priced like “131’12”... why is ‘ used and not the normal .
I see you’re using tastyworks! How do you like the platform/brokerage thus far? They are also releasing the Small Exchange for smaller contract sizes and easier multipliers for futures.
It's a throwback to when the market was priced in fractions. For some reason bonds never got out of it, I suppose something to do with the fact that they have long lifespans? They are priced in 1/32nd of a point. so 131'12" means 131 and 12/32nds. Or 131 and 3/8th if you're into the whole brevity thing, man. lol So it goes 131'00" at the start of the 131 price, and ends at 131'31". That is 32 ticks for a point. Then the next tick up is 132'00" to start the next point.
TW is pretty good; I like the platform quite a bit, and have been using it for options trading for a good while. Can't do any chart trading on it, so no futures trading as such - just options on futures - so I'm using TradeStation for that. The Small Exchange was supposed to happen last year, and when I emailed them about it, they gave me a cheery-sounding stall packed with market-speak. Hopefully it'll happen some time this year.
Did a bunch of trades in MYM today; it felt - odd, by comparison to CL. Kinda spiky, sharp movements, if that makes any sense (don't know how to quantify it otherwise.) Up $44 overall, which surprised me. It's also a bit frustrating, actually, because it feels like I'm doing nothing more than following a routine - just disciplined risk management and basic technique - with the rest being random chance that just somehow happens to work out in my favor on a regular basis. I don't know why it's going right - which also means I don't know what to do when it goes wrong. This mirrors my experience in CL, where I was getting 70-80% win ratios as well, and feeling the same way. As a baseline for what I'm doing: market profile and volume, plus watching the chart. I've got a couple of other indicators running, but I find that I pay them very little attention - maybe as weak, secondary confirmation, but that's all. For the most part, I'm just watching the price action: how it moves, and where it hesitates; where the buying or selling "fights to stay alive" before pivoting. I look at several different timeframes to establish context, anything from 4h down to 15m, and make my entries on the 5m or even the 1m chart with stops/limits at a ratio of 1:1. In CL, that's 10 ticks/$100 for each; in MYM, it turned out that 10 ticks is too narrow and the stop gets knocked out by noise (I'm not treating this as gospel; that's just how it worked out today) so I went to 20 ticks/$10 RRR. I'll also note that TradeStation's record-keeping sucks, horribly; when I saw @Overnight's NinjaTrader trade analyzer in his journal, I damn near died from envy. He gets nice stats, percentages, multiple sim accounts... I get visual noise that instantly scars your retinas, and, um, good luck with that calculation stuff. Oh, well; at least they show the totals for the day on another page. Can't wait for that AMP account to come through.