Maybe I am missing something but I cannot see where you can even subscribe to DAX quotes from IB... If they don't have quotes then how can you can trade it through IB? Eurex they have. I am in the US...
Yes, you can have quotes on IB if you subscribe from your account on the IB website - 8 euros/month. There is also the German Bund (GBL), which BTW, rolls over today to the Sept contract. 10 euros/0.01 tick - dont know if Simtrader is also trading this. pretzel
After today I am a believer in the VDU bars. I combined that with what I am already looking at and it worked like magic. In fact if you were just looking for VDU bars there were three trades already today worth 8 - 10 points. Hopefully today use and consistency is indicative of future accuracy. It is just another trick to add to the bag to fill in the complete picture of what is going on.
5 minutes all the way. I track all 4 main index markets side-by-side to watch for confirmation/nullifying signals. 4 main are ES, YM in the US, and DAX, ESTX50 on Eurex. I don't really bother with NQ since it rarely tells me anything that ES doesn't already show. Take a look at the attached. 15:55 pivot high bar my chart time today June 5th (that's 09:55 EST). What a peach of a breakout in the DAX! It went straight up to my target of 15 points (375 Euros) without ever looking back. What was the ES and YM doing during this same time period? Sweet bugger all, that's what. Don't get me wrong I like ES trading but I just LOVE Dax trading. Even when trading only ES, NQ or YM ...it's amazing how many times you are helped by the two Euro markets. Just the other day I was long the ES which gave no indication of a top, suddenly the DAX gave a raging key reversal bar so I bailed the ES short of my target but with more profit than had I held on. Anyone not trading or following all four (or five) index futures side-by-side is seriously missing out. To answer your question, I trade the DAX & ESTX50 from 09:40 to 11:30 EST. But I live in Europe so even much better, I trade the first two hours of their own opening. That would be 03:00am - 05:00am EST. The move in this time period is often just beautiful. None of you US people to bugger things up!
With discretion: $150 - $200 away, or behind a recent pivot, or behind a very strong up bar as previously defined. I tend to move them quite quickly because I expect a strong up bar very soon after entry. If I don't get it, and the market seems faltering then I may scratch the trade. But I'll usually give it 3-4 bars to move in my direction before I think about scratching.
The Bollinger Bands are length 10, standard deviation 1.8. The moving average is actually an "Adaptive Moving Average" with length 11 and FastC of 5, SlowC of 5. Whatever the hell that all means! Truth is, I just plugged in the default indicators from my charting software SierraChart without caring or trying to fine tune any settings. I simply liked the look of them on the chart. That's how unscientific I am. Pretzel is correct. It costs 8 Euros a month to get Eurex data from IB. I was being a little facetious when I said zero cost! But it's a chicken ***t cost compared to the benefit obtained of charting these symbols. No I don't trade the Bund on Eurex. But only because I don't consider the intraday moves big enough for my taste. I see it just set a record of 2 million contracts traded in one day. It would be a great symbol to trade in a slightly longer timeframe. I just stick to the index futures, since they are all so closely correlated. To the unaware, just bear in mind that Eurex is opposite to Globex in the sense that stops are held native, while stop-limits are not (in Globex it's the other way around). Other than that, trading the DAX and ESTX50 on IB is exactly like trading the ES and NQ.
Do you like the KMX example today. Another tenured stock I have is SAPE. When anything is coming out of DU, you can bet on the impact of very few first trades to goose it. Then the herd rolls into the picture.