Fantastic post, Pabst. I dont see mini-corn, or mini -soy, heading down the same path as eurex canola, or london wheat. They were always thin, still worse than woefull, but these new contracts are working off established market bases. I could be wrong, obviously, but seems to me, a superior product, in an inferior speculative marketplace.
You might try experimenting and developing your own trading system. Here are the results of a trend following system model for corn futures, 43.17 years of daily price data from 2 July 1959 to 1 October 2002. === Number of trades 122 Total profit $ 2673283 Profit after subtracting $ 10.00 commission, slippage per transaction: $ 2670843 Heat is 2.00 per cent of equity. Greatest draw down is 0.1828 (18.28 per cent). Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is 61.87 per cent. CAGR / Drawdown is 3.39 Instantaneously Compounding Annual Growth Rate (ICAGR) is 7.69 per cent. Annually Compounding Annual Growth Rate (ACAGR) is 8.00 per cent. Information Ratio is 0.22 Initial capital is $ 100000 === I suspect trading corn futures in a portfolio with a few other commodities might show overall lesser draw down. If you want to learn to play piano, <img src=http://www.victorholt.com/things/piano.jpg \img> at some point you have to do it yourself.
Thanks for all the posts. Recently I use the opening call of hightower report as a general brief guideline for each day. I often read something like "buy breaks" in this report. Can someone tell me what it means in grain trading? For example, in today's opening call, the author wrote "WHEAT: RAINS HIT AUSTRALIA ON WEEKEND AND IN FORECAST FOR EUROPE; BUY BREAKS" Does it mean "buy break out of the range" or "buy weakness"? - Clearpicks
If you are going to trade the grains you better add this one to your favorites: http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?navid=AGENCY_REPORTS&navtype=RT&parentnav=NEWSROOM&edeployment_action=changenav