I was quite surprised recently by a flurry of posting interest in NQ daytrading in the Strategy forum. In my experience NQ traders are a furtive lot who simultaneously are thrilled and embarrassed by their perverse fetish. If you delve into their postings you will see that they are not the usual lot of ET posters. So I thought here to give this hermite group a place to express their oft bizarre notions of market mechanics. Please, some rules if you post, to avoid the recent tendency to consign brilliant threads to Chit-Chat: 1) always be serious, or appear to be, to those of lesser intellect 2) do not diss sponsors 3) resist the temptation to deride the average ET reader 4) include some bit of NQ lore, no matter how absurd, in each post 5) instantly crush disruptive attention-seeking multiple aliases (I mean, an alias of an alias, how lame is THAT?) I will start us off with the attached two-year daily chart of NQ. Lest you think I am an idiot, I hasten to add that I do not have any NASDAQ funds in my long-term portfolio. What do we see when we mentally compare the attached chart to the current performance of $DJX, $SPX, or $RUT? Daytrader heaven! Volatility! Uncertainty! Money! Over to you, NQ daytraders.
I'm not catching your point here, the NDX pattern is not dissimilar to the other major indices. http://dynamic.nasdaq.com/dynamic/nasdaq100_activity.stm
Was commenting just on the little wiggles the past few days, see attached $SPX for comparison. A conversation starter, really. You trade NQ intraday, as I recall.
I´ve been looking into ES for some time, but the new 0.25 on NQ has really caught my attention. Is it much different from QQQ?
Haven't traded the qubes for years, but I understand from posts here that there is difficulty shorting them now. No problem shorting NQ, it's all manufactured out of thin air, like printed money. Best thing about NQ IMO is the clean charts. Executions and reports are lightning fast, so TA is more consistent it seems to me. If you like to read the tape, NQ T&S is a dream. Plus you don't have to fuck with reporting each and every trade at tax time, you just use the single P/L statement your broker provides. And there are some cool (weird?) people here who trade it, not at all like the stodgy broomstick-up-the-ass types who trade ES. They will eventually show up here. I estimate that there are at most a dozen people here who trade it seriously every day. Some of them even claim to make money.
I´ve never been able to grasp how to read the tape on the futures market... weird ppl ehh? I guess I might just take a look.
A hint, possibly seditious: set the NQ T&S volume filter to 100. Better than watching Oprah. Or Jerry Springer. Or General Hospital.
There is no "live" NQ pit, only a large order "virtual pit" at the CME. But I am the wrong person to ask, perhaps someone who cares about such things can enlighten you. To me NQ is merely a grand and glorious Pachinko game. Like a slot machine, I know very little about the actual internal mechanism, only what the bet size is, the tick, the odds, the payoff, and the gotchas. To me it is nothing but a rigged on-line multiplayer game filled with inside jokes. But it is easier to understand and score with than women, for which I am grateful. P.S.: If you get lonely, it is easy to make your own squawk box with sounds keyed to various volume events, which is what I do. I find that it is helpful in staying alert for 390 minutes.