When you say "products" hopefully your data points are for the exchange spreads and not individual product expiry data fed into a synthetic Spread combination. Big difference when you are dealing with expiries beyond the prompt months. Also, keep in mind that a Spread bid/ask will be continuously moving (with the rest of the forward curve) - but may only trade a few to several times per day for example.
Oh, sure. A classic example would be STIRS vs Treasuries. Cash vs Futures basis trades. Equity Indices. There are literally tens of thousands of opportunities here. It's a great way to trade. No need to hyper focus yourself into a migraine coma on ES and CL for seven hours a day with 10,000 other traders. Oh, and prop futures firms and bank desks are heavily stocked with all different species and varieties of Spread traders.
I can get the actual b/a and actual trades for calendars of any duration. But, more complex spreads seem to be synthetically derived. That or Oil Flys are rare.
eSignal can provide this. Use the explicit exchange traded symbol and then go from there. If you know efs you can even automate the per month volume stats. I made a related post on this in another thread but the reality here is that to get the best execution on oil flies you have to use the calendars (meaning it's technically a synthetic or legged entry where each leg is a cal). That's why you're not going to see much volume on those things. What sucks about this is you cannot use native exchange stops and limits here unless you like getting robbed. Yes you can totally put the orders in and all that but the b/a spreads and liquidity are garbage compared to legging the cals. This is where products like trade sniper or autospreaders become useful because they allow you to still manage risk on a synthetic position where the exchange is too much of a big dumb animal to provide a decent book for it.
I don't know about the exchange (CME) being a big dumb animal. I think it is walking a fine line between sustaining and milking the broker/vendor ecosystem around it (aside from the trading public).
I'm just trying to understand this ... so does TradeSniper (and other autospreaders) hold onto the stops to exit a trade for each of the legs (each leg being an exchange traded calendar) and only submit them to the market when required, as you don't trust others seeing your stops?
It's not an issue of others seeing your stops or anything like that - it's a matter of having something other than the exchange manage a fly/condor/double fly/etc type position where the exchange provides a sub-par book for the native spread. If you look here you'll see differences in implied functionality depending on the strategy (spread) type: CME Globex Product Reference Sheet Example: As can be seen above, CL flies have no implied functionality. Even if they *did*, CME is still not going to give you an implied fly price that is based off the best prices from the underlying cals - they'll use the outrights instead. So if you have tighter cal books for whatever reason you won't get the advantage of it (ICE is better in this regard) with regards to the fly.
AutoSpreader and other multiple product legging software tools have to be registered with the trading exchange - the orders they submit to the exchange are not firm orders, they are conditional orders. As such, the orders these registered tools submit to the exchange are specially designated and are in the back of the order queue which explains why it is so easy to get hung using an Auto Spreading-type tool. And that is why you are so much better off from an execution standpoint using the exchange supported spread. You can also leg calendar pair spreads yourself manually to create butterflies, condors, etc. etc.