Trading the Currencies

I was thinking of trading the currency futures on CME (e.g., euro, yen, british pound futures) and was wondering whether anyone here could help me with choosing a couple of the best contracts.

Which 2-3 contracts have the best liquidity?

How about the contracts on NYBOT?

Does anyone know a good source or two for this type of information?

TIA.

 

ZBEAR,

Thanks for your input, but I was looking to trade the currencies futures on CME (or NYBOT) not the Forex stuff, which seems to dominate the moneytec.com website.

Or, did I misunderstand?

 

No you didn't misunderstand.
I just gave it a shot - there's some data on currency futures in some of the previous messages - but you have to dig.

Just thought that it might be a resource for you -
Sorry if it's not .

 

ZBEAR,

OK, I'll dig a bit deeper - thanks for your help.

 

Choose something with tight spread like EUR/USD and trade when NY or/and London are open. Spread for EUR should be 2 to 3 or even 1 tick(s). The Yen is also liquid, but you always have to fight with a lot of zeros and IB account statements do not show the last 2 digits (AFAIK). Much nicer to see Yen quoted as USD/JPY ~ 120.00 in FX spot market than those CME futures with JPY/USD ~ 0.0000something.

 

Yannis,

The most liquid contracts are the eurocurrency and the yen, although British pounds and swissie are ok. CD and aussie are tradeable but not as liquid normally. I've never done anything with any of the others, but some of them are interesting,eg, Mexican peso.

The way the prices are quoted is a bit confusing as some vendors give you all the zeros and some don't. The notation is different from the FX market as well and can lead to confusion. In futures, they are all quoted in dollars, whereas in FX they are quoted based on which side is "bigger", so you have dollar/yen but cable is sterling/dollar.

The CME website has all the info you will need on the contracts, etc.

 

The Euro FX and the Yen are the most active currencies on Globex. Pound and Swiss are pretty active as well.

The Nybot Finex currencies have little volume and open interest



http://www.cme.com/prices/gbulletin_action.cfm

 

lists Futures liquidity every month.

 

http://www.cme.com/products/currency/products_currency_eurofx.cfm