Yeah SPX and SPY. Can’t trade Sunday, but I don’t know how realistic the CME fill engine will be. I may have an advantage trading real money if the CME contestants are lifting offers. Not comm-free due to ops.
Well, the CME contestants aren't lifting shit, since they're on SIM. You're not. In fact, you would be affecting THEIR trading, because you're actually impacting the bids and offers THEY are trading on! ;-)
@.sigma if they can't fill inside the spread they have to take the price at the ask. In most liquid futures contract they're typically won't be a gap between the bid and the ask but there's still a spread... that's just the way two sided markets work. For example the ES moves in .25 increments... its liquid so a typical bid and ask might be 3100.00 and 3100.25. It's not easy to get filled at the bid unless you're towards the front of the queue catching people trying to get out without your price level getting cleared out. As a matter of fact if you want to sell at the ask and make the one tick profit you want the others in the queue not to be completely filled at your level or the price gets traded through and the bid becomes 3999.75 and the ask becomes 3100.00. getting out at the ask without the price moving up an increment is even more unlikely if your entering a sell order right after your buy order due to your queue position but if the price moves in that direction your fine and you get your tick but your not technically "buying at the bid selling at the ask". If your taking liquidity as in you want to get in and out right now taking what's on the order book you lose a tick because you have to buy at the ask and sell at the bid. This is where the sim is unrealistic... you can buy at the ask and get out immediately at the ask everytime... your position should be in the hole as soon as you open it if you're buying at the ask and the price doesn't move. My guess is this is just part of the software they're using, its typical of the less realistic sims. And due to this lack of realism you probably can't get filled at the bid (which is once again difficult) because they aren't using a realistic model for estimating queue position and the order book. So I guess theres an advantage and disadvantage but the user of the CME contest sim is mostly at an advantage because buying at the bid aint typically easy. And in this example btw there's no "inside the spread" because its as tight as it can be. If the spread was 3100.00 and 3100.50 (so .50 spread) getting a fill at 3100.25 would be getting filled inside the spread. Ive sometimes seen spreads like that for the ES but they're not typical due to the very high trading volume with that contract. Also I dont think this particular sim engine takes into account things like this there's just a price and everyone trades off that... they do seem to delay fills sometimes but it doesn't seem to be based off any type of accurate queue position estimate.
No problem. Just re-read it, lots of typos in there. Mixing up they're and there, your and you're. Can't fix them now.
All challenges are just gamble games. They are not testing your trading skill, but your luck. Since only first three places get the prizes, your normal trading strategy is not going to work. Even if you can double your account per month in real trading,in a 5 days period you can only profit less than 20%, which is not enough to get you a prize.To get a prize, you need 10 times more than that. So the best strategy is to place a big bet at one direction with big leverage on the most volatile instrument.The rest is on your luck.And only this way you have a small chance.If you don't do this,plenty guys will do. And the result is the luckiest guys win the prizes.