if it is possible to place an order before the futures market opens... does this mean that one can use this to his advantage....for example, if you knew the market was going to go down that day but you wanted the market to start off at a high price.... can you place a very large buy order before hours and cancel the order right at the last minute....maybe it won't influence the market greatly but to some degree, would this push up the price at opening? also if you place an order before the futures market opens, is there any chance that at open...you will be filled at the gap price?
I repeat PLEASE go back and read and learn you arnt ready for these markets. You havent even the most basic knowledge of how the market works.
I hate these people who come on here and tell me what to do. Just because I don't know specifics, it doesn't mean I can't trade. My question was not, should I trade or not. If you can't answer the question, then why waste your time? I bet you're one of those people who come on here and have no questions and seem to have all the answers, yet is losing money each day. You're pretty much wasting hard drive server space with that those two replies.
No offense, but dont get used to the idea of EVER knowing where a market will go in advance of the day. The rest of this situation is irrelevant.
z32000, As background you may want to check two parts of the daily Activity. One part is the comparison of the open period of markets and the closed period of markets. The open period is much less time than the closed period. If you make a long term graph of prices for each, you will see that one is ever increasing and the other is ever decreasing. Knowing this will inform you about the difference in just day trading and position trading. The other part is to understand how markets open with respect to the premium of the instrument. You will find that the offset is the premium or fairprice within a period of time after the open. Knowing how long this takes is important and it is important to know how these sequence comes into balance. The first part tells you the apparent bias of each the day traders and position traders. Aside from these two cardinal aspects of trading, it is important to know why and how price moves. As you can see this is not clear to the participants on ET. Most of trading turns out to be counter-intuitive for several basic reasons. You must be fair to yourself and understand these things thoroughly. Set aside debriefing time to examine your precepts to assure that you build by putting each piece in place correctly. You can see many posts on ET where the basis of the comment is unfounded simply because the person has put the pieces preceeding the comment together improperly. Your memory of improper reasonings is not going to go away. These unfortunate efforts will always be there. It is difficult to succeed in not using mistaken past efforts as a first resort when you are trying to trade and improve your trading. The high rate of failure that we all are surrounded by is a consequence of people reasoning improperly to get to where they repeatedly fail and then retire from trading. There is a requirement for critical thinking to become a knowledgable and skilled trader.
Mate you are so clueless that I was trying to do you a favour as only a complete noob would ask such questions but hey you want to trade knock yourself out. BTW I have been in the business (broker/trader) since 1992 lets see if you last as long?
no offense...but I never claimed to say that I did. Here is why this is a legit question... I always thought of buying and selling stocks just like putting up say an item on ebay. The price only goes up if there is a buyer willing to pay more for it. Well I have interactive brokers and pretty much after the market closes on Friday, the entire weekend it isn't possible to put in an order except a few hours before the market opens on Sunday. This leaves me to believe that there is only a narrow timespan for any market activity to influence the opening price. I would also assume that the first few opening trades would be large in ask and bid SIZE. Much of the time, this is not the case yet the price seems to move greatly at times. So this makes me wonder, when does the system kick in to start calculating the opening price when the market is closed? Does it make this calculation right upto the point of opening? If it's all automated then, why is it if I wanted to cancel my market order it isn't instantly. Computers should be able to make calculations fast enough to almost real-time. Just things to ponder about. A lot of people no-a-days seem to trust so many things. I like to find loop holes in everything. I believe in developing a trading system and testing it for a year before trading. I have mulipled my demo account by 8 times in 1 month. Sure it's not real money, but genius is in the method of understanding how it work and asking a lot of questions. I might have already discovered the holy grail, but these are just little technicalities that might even further my advantage in the long run.
this is what baffles me... say if you are trading and all of a sudden, the price jumped by a huge amount yet you see no trading volume... in order for the market to adjust to a higher price, is there not suppose to be a trail of executed trades to bring the price up or can the price go up based on the amount of "buyers" lining up without the trade being executed yet...meaning, if I line up as a buyer, I still have the option to cancel my order. So does price move on actual trades or potential trades? If I take the example of ebay, if I was to bid on an item....sure, the price will move up... but if i officially cancel the bid afterwards, the price should come down... I would think it would be much more fair if the market price moved on actual trades instead of "potential" trades....so when I see a large gap with no trades, this makes me wonder how the market price is specifically calculated.