Traders' Roundtable

An interesting review of volume trends in 08 with list of most active.
PDF attached

I've always been uncomfortable about drawing conclusions from data on TOTAL volume (i.e. volume of all contract months). Probably because I don't trade strips and packs and bundles and stacks, myself.

For plain old ordinary folks like me who only trade the front month, the volume of all the other contracts -- especially the volume of far faraway back months -- isn't so interesting. So I like to investigate the volume of the Traded Month only, i.e., the contract month I actually will be trading. Keeping in mind of course that there is no universally agreed upon definition of what "the traded month" actually is; it depends on your rollover methodology, and everybody seems to use a slightly different roll algorithm.