I hear ya, plenty of room to trade and I don't trade the open as I live in Chicago but relative to 3-5 years ago this dax is dead. I remember not even wanting to get up to refill my coffee because I would miss a trade. It moved like is does on the open all day. Now I can leave for an hour and not miss a thing, sometimes three hours. We had a row of guys scalping 2-3 lots taking out a couple grand a day, no exageration. But just look at historical vol. In the late 90s- 2002 vol was above 25, pushing 50 on extremes. Now to get it to 20 is a miracle. I've been trading the dax too long to cry sour milk, there a tons of opportunities each day regardless of how you trade. My only point in all this is that program trading has completely changed the market. It is nothing like it use to be.
Even the opening is now quite dull. i remember doing 20 ticks right on the first minutes of trading. but when the eurex changed the opening time, also this ended. still tradeable in the long run but just using an adaptable bot IMO.
Wow, must have been wild wild west back then. What was an average daily volume then? I skip the first hour (which does not matter since underlying open 1 hour later) and than trade for the next 3 hours.
In the late 90's average daily volume was mid 30K. It was thin and when a 50 lot market order came into the book, it moved the market at least 10 ticks. But when there was a 50 lot there, it was there and real. You couldn't trade much more than a 10 lot without risking major slippage. At that time the emini had just started up and it was only doing about 100K a day. A couple years later they introduced the eurostoxx which started a little slow but is a much better institutional product for hedging than the dax, which is why it took off. Volume in the dax didn't take off until program trading kicked in, slowly in 2001-2002 and much bigger from 2003 on. I still remember an article on the cover of the WSJ in November of 2003 talking about dax traders in Chicago and how they were making all this money at 4 in the morning. Myself and a couple other traders just laughed, knowing it was the Sports Illustrated cover jinks. That was it. In January of 2004 program trading took over big time.
"Scalpers don't need to use stops" yea, right. i scalp for a living. and i wouldn't DREAM of scalping index futures without a stop you can survive 500 trading days in a row without a hard stop until that one day, the market blows downward (or upward) against your position this happened in the nikkei not too long ago, a MASSIVE fast move downwards that could easily have wiped you out without a stop (fat fingered trader) also, if your connection goes down for a minute or two, and you are reconnecting, could that be the period where the dow drops 500 pts? sure. trading futures without stops is moronic.