It's accurate using the spread convention I gave you, I wouldn't say the same for the butterfly since you can't trade those through an exchange traded spread, so not sure what you can really do there.
I trade CL and NG butterflys and condors all the time using exchange-supported spreads. Buy Nov-Dec and Sell Dec-Jan and you are long the 'fly. Buy Nov-Dec and buy Jan-Feb and you are long a condor. Love those things. Do it with Eurodollars and Euribor too. Spread City.
Agreed. And you definitely don't want to attempt legging the things manually. In terms of slippage economy the exchange spreads are the only way to fly.
Looks like the EIA inventory report was more bearish for gasoline than oil, since the RBX0/CLX0 spread tightened up quite a bit. Both inventory reports were pretty bearish, though.
How do the energy spread markets interact with the individual markets in terms of price and volume prints? I hear that the NYMEX has a spread matching engine that executes certain spreads as a spread, not two legs. Does each leg's print show up on the underlying contracts? What about pending orders showing up on the DOM for each leg? Sometimes, I'll be watching, say, the CLX0 chart, and I see 400 contracts print, without a huge move in price. Is that a spread hitting the market, or a block trade (or a trader who is good at working a large order.) Can you tell I'm new at this?
I'm not sure that has anything to do with spreads or at least not all the time...just because the depth looks like it's relatively thin for the volume that trades doesn't mean it's truly that thin...there are plenty of icebergs out there.
It has absolutely everything to do with spreads, and the CME and ICE internal order matching spread engine. Set your trading front-end to see the implied pricing. On ICE the flat price block trades are printed seperately on WebICE. On CME, the Clearport flat price block trades are not printed on the CME Nymex price/volume feed for the futures. That 400 lot is a spread order getting matched internally at CME. It is real and it counts, but isn't a factor in terms of flat price per se. Set your front end for implieds. It will open up your eyes. Energy is a spreader's market.