Futures are for daytrading; most stocks are not daytrading stocks. They do work for stocks that have heavy daytrader involvement, like GOOG, AAPL, BIDU, and such.
I realized after....oops....These are Wednesday's YM levels! R2 13158 R1 13094 PIVOT 12972 S1 12908 S2 12786
What is significant about PP, S1, S1.5, S2, R1, R2, etc.? I am just learning about them now. So if the price is under the PP, for example, what does that mean as far as your trading decisions go? Is it supposed to reverse when it reaches the PP? etc.
Perhaps The OP can tell us when they work. Some guru's use S1 as support and/or breakout SHORT and vice versa for R1. I do not use them much, and have not found these levels to be significant.
Anything that works only 50% of the time is probably not gonna be worth it, unless your R:R is pretty damn good. That being said, I plot my pivots, but I'll never base a trade off them. They're unreliable.
If you are going to use pivots in your trading, my advice is not to rely on a mathematical formula to magically provide them for you. What you want to do is examine a multi day chart as well as the daily or maybe weekly and notice which are keys areas of support and resistance. This will work much better than your mathematically based ones. NN
If the price is under the PP it indicates a bearish sentiment but it is not sure that the price will reverse from PP. I have been watching pivot points for a while for NASDAQ100 and SP500 indices and as I see it is better to trade breakouts (especially from PP,S1,R1 and carefully from S2,R2) than trade reversals. Although considering the range between these levels it is often profitable to trade reversal from S3 or R3.
I find they work very well. I fade them in the direction of "the trend". IOW, I use them as pullback trading points for whatever direction the mkt. seems to be going. I learn more about them, and the mkt, every day. I use the OHLC #'s off the CBOT website for the YM, and an important point to remember is to use the CBOT Settlement price instead of the "closing" price, because many contracts end the day at the Settlement price, not the "closing" price. I use limit orders inside of a Market Bracket with predetermined stop loss, and set my entry 3pts above/below the exact Pivot Point price. All of this is subject to change the more I learn about the Mkt.
Pivot Point SpreadSheet Calculator... Enter High Low Close Values manually only and rest (PP, S1, R1, etc.) will calculate... Last column in the sheet is the Overnight High and Low of the Globex which can be interesting minor resistance or support areas...