A good price action-based model will indeed pick up on seasonal tendencies and changes in fundamental drivers. You will be later to the party than the Commercials - but that's OK, because the object is to make money and not get your ass run over. The Commercials will do the heavy lifting in terms of changing or extending trend patterns - and your job as an individual speculator is to go with them. At least that's my take on things and that's what I teach my own clients. For example, I know virtually nothing about Sugar and Coffee fundamentals - but they have been very good spread trades for us the past few years. Furthermore, there are many HF's and private equity groups that trade these electronic markets based strictly from price action. I have one client who is particularly good at trading Live Hogs versus Corn and he came to me as a Forex scalper of all things.
No matter what time frame you use for your "go-to" trading chart setup - if at any point you are unsure or a bit confused, then simply look at some longer timeframes to get some resolution and color to where the market seems to want to go. Simple but effective.
Another client webinar recording going out today. This is John and Lee's second webinar meeting with me about paper trading. Their metrics look really good thus far, but since they just started mid-August way too early to make a judgement. Very good diversification. Lee has nine positions active at the moment. The video file is a compressed MP4 file format, clients please save it to your PC's hard drive once you download it off of your personal Hightail account.
For new clients I have been taking on the past couple of years, the typical "norm" for getting through the initially supplied materials seems to be about four weeks. The recorded webinars are about an hour each.
If you can't seem to find the exact spread combination you're looking for in Market Explorer or you platform's order book, please do not leg individual product spread components. You'll get f****d. Leg the exchange supported calendars and butterflies to come up with the condor or double butterfly or combination of your choosing. Much less slippage and greatly reduced risk.
Bone, I recall a post you made some time ago (years ago?) where you mentioned that your crew also likes customized spreads where you trade creative combos. In this case, you cannot always use an exchange supported spread because you're doing something unique (or at least uncommon). Any thoughts on the best approach on executing orders for these custom spreads? I indicated in a previous post that I enter a limit order for the spread and once the limit price is reached and the first leg executes, the remaining legs get filled with market orders. Any advice on a better approach?