Those prints are hedges. Market participant holds equities position and buys insurance through options. Options market maker writes the opts and has temporary risk exposure. The opt mm firm's risk manager immediatly sends instruction to employee whose job it is to buy/ sell index futs to lay off temporary risk. The price doesn't matter as his instructions will be to get net L/S X cars of ES/NQ depending on whatever opts were written. At the end of every day they will be net neutral their exposure till they write opposing opts, then they take the futs off. This goes on all day, the futures price has nothing to do with the operation. It is a continuous ameliorating of temporary risk exposure all day long. You see it in the morning because there is new risk from Europe and cleaning up the remainders from the previous day as thier risk profiles morph. The results of this function causes arbs to get involved further skewing the prices and the game goes on. Options can affect stock prices more deeply than most realise. There is a guy on this site , jim c, whose job it is to buy/sell futs for an opts mm. Maybe he can jump in and explain it thoroughly and correct any errors I've made. Also, this is why eqiuties index futs are generally a TA play and not a fundamental play. I don't want to argue about it.
A funny for you. I have been distracted by other stuff all day, slipping into the market only intermittently to scalp the odd bottle of Gloria here and there. Of course I focus on one second and tick, and only look at one minute for orientation (should I be shorting or longing). All of a sudden, the audibles die, the tick chart stops streaming, the "Teach Me To Trade" colors stop flashing, one second goes stone cold. What? The NQ feed is dead! Wireless is still up. Internet is still good. OK, oil is still quoting. Curse you, E-Signal! You screwed me again! Thank God I wasn't in a trade! Then I looked at the time. 4:15 ET.
Wow - big drop right at the end, huh? - Qcom really dragged them down (Intc didn't help), was down almost 20% ($6) after the close but has bounced back a bit, now down $3.50 or so - will be interesting to see where we reopen here in 10 minutes, esp with apple up 4% after hours. Edit: Hmmm - when did they start re-opening at 4:30 instead of 4:45? (I don't usually watch after RTH.)
Yeah, sometimes it looks like the fix in and they know things WE don't before the close. No obvious transition from the pre- to the post-close action.
is it difficult to trade apex to apex lowest low and highest high? i hate to miss it by even a point...i wasn't happy with the 90 % stuff....pushing to perfection.....YM NQ ES....