Traders' Roundtable

these spreads. Are you considering trading from the floor? or just very short term trading these spreads off the floor.
I traded short term techniques for a long time and it is hard to get the edge in short of always buying on the bid and sell at the offer plus go for the short term swings. The S/T swings are mostly noise and harder to predict then some other patterns, but by no means imposssible.
If you try to use S/T SR points to trade then why would you bother with the spreads?

Less risk essentially---but I'm not looking at Supp/Res. but rather the intra-day swing in the spread. And if a portion of it can be caught by someone off-floor.

Thanks for the reply. Allen

I think you may have better success at trading the electronic market spreads as you can execute them automatically at predetermined levels. You can use something like AutoSpreader in Trading Technologies to easily trade these spreads, lightning fast, and manage the positions and orders. I would forget the floor completely. The electronic markets are very tight now, and often the pit is looking to them for guidance, particularly in the Nasdaq 100 futures. Unless you can trade for extremely low costs (i.e. member clearing rates on fees and perhaps $0.50/turn commission from your FCM), I would be suspect about having much of an edge in calendar spreads in these markets unless you have a method that legs the spread in some way.

You may want to view the video on TT's website from a CBOT spread trader:

http://www.tradingtechnologies.com/products/index.html#