Traders' Roundtable

Hi c.f. and TK,
Thank you for the links and the information, I will check them out.

Hello Hiramhon
Sometimes the problem with newbies is they don't quite know that some questions they may not consider to be total newbie questions get regarded as such. In this case I thought this was a subjective topic that depended on each individual's trading experience so I posted the question ...

Hi,
Does anyone have any observations on which month of a particular contract is the best one to trade? For eg. if I'd like to trade soybeans, and at any one time there are 6 contracts being actively traded, each with a different delivery month.

Is there a rule of thumb on which of these contracts ...

Thank you for the reply.

Yes I made a mistake in my interpretation of the prices of futures, as they were in ASCII format and they came something like 232.50 and instead of taking that as $2.32-1/2 I took it to mean $232.50. Sorry about that.

All
I made a serious mistake which makes all my questions irrelevant, I know I'll laugh my head off about this a year down the road, but you guys go ahead first. I misread the prices for the futures I was testing on. The prices were in ASCII format and came like "230.50" or "242.25". This means $2 ...

Newbie trader here looking to get into futures shortly.

Still writing my trading plan, and about to start backtesting mechanical systems, but I'm trying to decide on my portfolio of futures.

Recognising that, for example, Eurodollars, cattle and oil are likely to be uncorrelated markets, is ...

Hi Hlpsg, you're math is incorrect. You correctly state that a 1c move is $50, you go long one contract, but you then multiply the 8 cent move by $5000 not $50. The price of wheat is in cents per Bu not dollars.

Hope this helps.

Darren, you are absolutely correct, it should have been 0.08 * 5000 ...

hlpsg,

If you think it is risky to speculate on futures think twice before venturing into options. Before settling on a diversified portfolio of futures markets I did consider options. Two observations struck me:

1) If I think determining the direction of price is hard enough what reason do I ...

That meltdown risk is a risk of futures. If you do not want to face this risk, you can as you say trade options or some other market (Forex for instance).

Richard, thanks for your continuing patience, I really appreciate learning here than learning out in the market, so thanks!

If I may ask ...

In some times in the past, commodities have been limit down for a number of days in a row. It would be very hard or impossible to close a position in that case while limit-down conditions prevailed, and you could end up owing your broker a good deal of money. This isn't common but it has happened ...

Thank you Richard. I was very uncomfortable with this uncontrollable risk and being a new trader with limited capital, I really will not be able to trade because one large drop down will wipe me out. So my original plan was out, because backtesting shows my current capitalization will not be able to ...

Thanks for all the feedback.

Richard, you are saying do not trade mini-corn/mini-soybean etc because of low liquidity, is that right? Thanks.

I have another question I hope someone can answer, from the CBOT website, regarding soybean trading, it says:

Daily Price Limit
-------------------
50 ...

Hi
Would like to hear your thoughts on which commodity a new trader should start off in, and why.

Hopefully one which is "safer" in that making some mistakes will not cost you your entire fortune.

This will also mean less leverage, a lot of volume and decent volatility.

Thanks!

What would you do to reduce risk in the following situation?

Let's say your not a day trader, and you're trading futures (wheat) where a 1 cent move is $50. You go long at $250.00 and you buy one contract of wheat. You place a stop loss simultaneously at 249.90 hoping to reduce your risk to (0.10 ...

Hi Biggdonn,
Thanks for the feedback! Do you (or anyone else) have a recommendation for a full service broker that also provides a paper trading service?

Here's what I'm trying to achieve, I'm a newbie to futures trading:-
1) Be able to call and talk to a broker (hopefully a seperate department ...

Hi
Has anyone used the services at www.mocktrading.com? I want to sign up but I did not see any link on the site for terminating my account should I wish to do so sometime in future. Just wanted to check if they are a reputable company. Emails to the company were also not answered. (Could it be the ...

Hi Shane
Thank you for your response. If you don't mind I would like to hear your views on my original posting (pls see the hyperlink). Basically Attain are able to get good fills on orders because they use these special execution desks. I'm not "in the business" so I do not really know how these ...

Hi
I'm looking for a broker to help me auto-trade RMesa5. I was thinking of going with Attain Capital but their charges are very high. However they justify their charges by stating that their orders result in very little slippage especially for day trading, because they use a "Special Execution Desk ...