A thread on trading ETF's and futures on ETF's : I have been trading ETF's exclusively for several months(QQQ and SPY) recently more like swing trading. Looking to get some leverage with ETF SSF's, while still allowing me to scale in and out of position which I can't really do with eminis. Just read in FuturesMag that ONE has futures on DIA, didn't know that they had already rolled out ETF's futures. The article says volume is very good, not too surprising I guess since the only alternative is DJ . Anyone tried them . What's the symbol in TWS? Thanks
DIA, There is a much improved symbol search from the IB web site. http://www.interactivebrokers.com/cgi-pub/contractSearch/symbolsearch.pl You can search by exchange, product, name, etc. When you find the product you like, click on the symbol to get a break down of multipliers and other info. The symbol is DIA.
The one thing that concerns me though is what do you do if ONE or NQLX goes down like they each did a couple of times, the market goes against you and you don' t have enough margin to hedge with the underlying Imagine a huge market meltdown/up you have 5 QQQ contracts or 3 DIA contracts but you have only 10-15K in your account. You are screwed. Also I can't find any realtime quotes for these contracts, this is how I 've been trading over the past few weeks: 60' charts from Datek,the ARCA book and the Streamer and free LiveCharts RT for Naz stocks,(delayed for eminis) and I 've got realtime futures quotes from Bloomberg TV. But I just can't find these SSF's quotes!
You might find the quotes on one of these sites: http://www.alaron.com http://www.futuresource.com I missed seeing NQLX down this week. But I've seen OneChicago down dozens of times, so I intend to avoid OneChicago. Also, trying to work out good hedging strategies. For instance, you could have out-of-the-money options to hedge against your positions, either long or short. Options don't use margin either. 5 QQQ contracts with a $10-15,000 account shouldn't be any real problem. You get 5:1 margin, so QQQ with no margin used would be $12,500.
Anyone knows when ISLD is going to start trading SSF's ? And whether the book will be available for free?