When you say "Futures Market" that could mean just about anything. If you mean US equities, then the indicator is 'common' for a group, not all traders. Fund managers watch RSI, 50 and 200 period SMA. Also, they watch the bond market, investor sentiment, news, and have armies of analysts and juniors crunching data. Day traders watch RSI, stochastics, MACD, momentum, trend lines, Fibonacci, gainers/losers. The sector ETFs are also used as indicators. Serious professionals are watching spreads and know price action cold. They know what to watch and how to interpret the action. They know how traders think, and how best to get ahead them. They make their own indicators and have multiple brokerage software. They use an API to drive real-time data into analytics platforms. They have 100's of thousands to millions for trading.
Years ago MetaStock came to town to pitch their latest version. The presenter knew the lingo and had obviously been a trader. And while MS has 100+ "tools and indicators" (including a custom section where you can concoct your own) and a 600 page manual to show you how to do everything.... when he got to the part about "indicators" he said.... "If you use indicators at all, just one.. right? Let's see a show of hands of those who agree". Almost every hand went up. FWIW...
Well I don't know others, but I rely exclusively on price and volume, with a Wyckoffian perspective on the markets. I developed my own system from that, which does include a bunch of indicators: volume bars (for individual candle analysis) , volume profile (for support and resistance), Weis waves (for analyzing, well, price waves), money flow index (for overall movement and divergences). I also use Bollinger bands and average true range for analyzing the volatility threshold of a given instrument and VWAP as a point of reference. I know it sounds like a load of stuff, but each indicator serves a specific purpose within my analysis.
what can you say about the average true range I'm familiar with it however you don't know what the range is going to be in a given day based solely on the recent past
Indeed, you don't. A lot of things have to be factored in determining the likely volatility of a future session -- one of the being the release of fundamental news or not -- and the actual ATR only gives you an average of how wide (that is, from top to bottom) the market tends to be. But that does not mean, at all, that you'll know where these will be beforehand. I actually use ATR on an intraday basis, most of the time. You see, I try to analyze the markets with regards to volume, price and volatility. ATR and Bollinger bands are tools I use to gain insight into the latter (volatility). So when price reaches what I call the "threshold of volatility", or in other words, the upper or lower Bollinger band, it tends to do either one of two things: keep moving in the same direction for a while or pulling back, eventually reversing. Both of these outcomes depend on how strong or weak the market has been moving in a given direction. In either case, the ATR is very good at telling me how much further price is likely to move beyond that point, which is simply two standard deviations from the average price of the past 20 periods (20 SMA). Put simply, I use the ATR as a mechanism to estimate my stop losses and profit targets. If price reaches, for instance, the upper Bolinger band with signs of weakness -- revealed by volume analysis --, I know it won't likely be able to move much higher than the first high it posts, unless it starts to show some signs of strength. In that case, if price manages to move beyond the ATR value or a multiplier (e.g. 2x ATR), that is precisely what would constitute a sign of strength - and in that case, I know my stops are not wider than necessary. Overall, like I said in a different post, indicators are tools, not crystal balls. They help you do something -- gain insight into a given instrument's market -- but they are only as good or useful as the person using them. P.S.: if you'd like to determine a day's range based on recent past, you should be looking into things such as support and resistance, volume profile and such. Hope this was helpful, cheers!