Could anyone tell me what contracts are actively traded? I notice some contracts are really liquid while others have absolutely nothing going on. Thanks
Confirmation of the obvious.......the most active futures will have the most active options trading. :eek:
most active...ES NQ YM...ES weekly's are good also CL/NG but not as active and sometimes harder to fill those are the only ones I have experience with...I seldom trade NQ or YM..personal pref is ES when I have extra cash and an opinion on CL or NG I'll trade those.
Personally I trade ES, NQ, TF. ES has decent volume, and very good fills, often better than midpoint. NQ a bit less volume but also very good fills. TF is awful on volume and fills, better to trade RUT but no SPAN margin on that one.
most farmers buy puts rather than short the futures. Daily volume can be deceptive, only a few trade each day, but the the over all volume over a season can be large. you need a long term perspective and only trade new crop which would be July wheat November beans December corn
NQ & ES are good. NG/CL are good too. ZB is the best. I never traded future option. I tried it in my paper account. the good thing is 24hrs open, you buy options any time you want. another plus is: there is no margin requirement. so you can hold and wait if tempriraly against you, until you are protibale. if big move is brewing, future option is great, since you do not need stop loss, ignore little (still large) adversay movement. easily doubled or tripled. if you caught crude from 110 to 77 recently or 77 to 95+, very good. I think it is good, if you have a big view about the direction. buy early as possible as you can. future options are very suitable for weekly/monthly timeframe. not several days, may be weeks and months. have a good vision, see things several weeks ahead. the minus is the volume is too thin, and the spread is large. if you want to buy it, maybe immediately red.
Actually... unlike miners, most farmers (producers of aggs) go long - ergo they buy calls or buy futures. "I will leave it to the reader to work out" the reasoning why, but it's pretty counterintuitive at first and very intuitive once you think about it.
no kidding, these farmers would come in to the "commodity office" as they called it in their overalls, claiming they were doing business, when in fact almost all of them went out long with a promise from me to "not tell their wives" but the few that actually do hedge usually prefer the puts.