ES: $500 per contract NQ: $500 per contract 6E: $1,000 per contract CL: $2,000 per contract Those are general guidelines to what current market action has been thru the past several months. Subject to change = expand as volatility increases across the board.
1) ?.....that's the "sigma". :eek: 2) Price times implied volatility divide by 16 for an approximate, expected, daily range. 3) The calculation is the same for all markets.
This may give some perspective on my equities trading in order to help show what I am referencing against. This is part of my execution and and what I consider "normal" for the timeframes used in the example with regards to equities. I used the same cash equity in order to compare like values. I have blown out an account before so I am very risk oriented as you can see. Hence the calculations with every trade. This would be representative of a swing trade lasting a week or more, but no longer than 2. This would be the same prices and execution, but more on a 1-3 day timeframe. This would just be a daytrade of a few minutes to a few hours. Thanks, J.
It's not rocket science. Set the dom up for oco and if you want in click higher or lower up on the dom than current bid ask and get filled instantly. You want out click the box on dom with red and blue square and black triangle to get flat then click the red circle on dom to pull all orders. Rinse and repeat.
All depends on the current volatility For now Es 6-10 points is average intraday range When vix is low and summer doldrums sometimes you may only get a 5-6 point range.
The last few response are great and insightful. Thanks! I appreciate the calculation for determining daily range. That will help going forward. All good so far! Thanks again, J. ---this time I really am logging off, lol. Back this evening.
You seem willing to put in the work necessary. Ninja Trader is FREE as long as you are not live trading through it. You also get free Kinetick EOD data which will allow you to get stuff like ADR / ATR. You have access to historical EOD data, I can't remember how far back it goes though. Visit the websites and look. Intraday data you have to pay for.
Keep up the hard work jtrader. Let me address the question of equities vs futures. It gets asked a lot on ET. As I've explained to Don Bright before, there is no material difference between equities and futures on a structural level. What I mean by that is, comparing apples to apples. For example SPY vs ES or USO vs CL or GLD vs GC. There is a difference trading pure equities like AAPL vs ES or XOM vs CL. Stocks trade different then ETF's and futures. Some of the advantages to futures are they trade 24/7. So you don't have gaps, they just keep trading. Obviously there are no hard to borrow issues when shorting which is very nice. Generally speaking, your commissions will be substantially less trading futures, even at the retail level then trading stocks. Leverage. This is a big one. You can get the same leverage at the retail level that you can get at the prop level for equities. This is one of the reasons why Don get's angry I think. He knows that retail traders don't need to go prop to trade futures but usually have to if they want to trade stock. The last advantage I think comes down the road when you become very successful, you can move far more size in futures then you can in stock. You can move 100 million worth of bonds in seconds. No way you could be that nimble in stocks. You can lift an offer on the e-minis with 10k on the offer and you just bought 650 million dollars worth of s&p 500 futures on a single print. Try doing that with stock. The hard part for a lot of guys who come from the stock world, especially if they trade small share size, is that futures contracts are very large. So by default you are already trading a very large position even on a one lot. And most newbies don't understand how much capital they really control. So try to be cognitive of size and the volatility of the product you are trading. A lot of guys look at dollar ATR's. Take the ATR times the tick value. So if CL has a 2 dollar ATR that's 2k per day per contract. The e-mini might have a dollar ATR value of $600 per day. Good luck jtrader!
... and if you want to prestage an order to enter on pullbacks, said order will change price values as the market moves i.e. CL trades 96.00 and you want to sell pullback 96.10 > stop 96.25 CL trades down to 95.84 and your prestaged order moves to 95.92 sell on its own. Watched that happen a dozen times and found no solution to the dilemma. Online instructions do not cover that aspect at all. If you try to make a habit of market orders in CL, the actual fills you get over the course of time will be a real adventure. This ain't the stodgy ES I'm talking about.