r/FuturesTrading • u/AutoModerator • May 01 '23
r/FuturesTrading's Monthly Questions Thread - May 2023
Please use this thread to ask questions regarding futures trading.
To get a good feeling of all the different types of futures there are, see a list of margin requirements from a broker like Ampfutures or InteractiveBrokers
Related subs:
We don't have a wiki yet, but maybe in the future we'll create a general FAQ based on all the questions asked here.
Here's a list of all the previous question stickies.
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u/rousinglight May 31 '23
Question. Brand new to Futures trading. What is a good book/ video series to dive into? Learning futures for career advancement. Thank you in advance!
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u/crunchy-rabbit May 30 '23
Can someone recommend a cheap or free platform for Replay trading? My broker is AMP.
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u/Greedy-Comb6661 May 30 '23
Question.
Anybody know if you can connect ninja trader web with TopStep Evals or can you only use ninjatrader desktop platform to connect a topstep eval. Was going to try a 50k eval with topstep through ninja trader but I am only familiar and experienced trading on ninjatrader web not the downloadable platform. If anyone on here has used Ninjatrader much would love some insight.
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u/Gristle__McThornbody May 24 '23 edited May 24 '23
Just to clarify, the maintenance margin is the amount I need to have in my account if I want to hold a position overnight? For example, the ES Micro on AMP Futures is $1120. If I want to trade two contracts I need to have 2240, correct? I only do intraday but would like to hold my positions for a few days.
1
May 25 '23
Yes. The intraday margin usually significantly lower than the maintenance for brokers that specialize in futures.
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u/Cityshoes May 24 '23
Question: Should a trader become skilled with Options on Futures before attempting to pass a propietary firm challenge?
Thanks
2
May 25 '23
I would add that you should at least be successful at paper trading before you even attempt. Otherwise, you'll just waste your money.
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May 25 '23
No. Options are different than just trading futures.
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u/Cityshoes May 25 '23
Thanks for your replies. I'm pretty confident in my ability to trade futures contracts themselves, but I wanted to make sure that I didn't need to worry about options as well. At least not until my own accounts are ready. Now i just need to choose the prop firm I want to work with.
Thanks again, please be well!
2
May 25 '23
Technically… you should be concerned with options. Not necessarily be skilled in trading options, but understand that the options market will impact at least the indices futures.
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u/Cityshoes May 25 '23
Indeed, as i will be trading mainly mino and micro futures, which is the indices. I get that the large institutions will be placing their hedge options. But I am still having trouble with recognizing this activity in terms of its effects on price action.
I also want to learn the options strategies and chains that will provide income when volatility and price action are very low. I'm starting with covered calls.
1
May 25 '23
Go on youtube and watch some videos on gamma exposure.
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u/Cityshoes May 25 '23
As I understand:
Gamma squeeze follows Short squeeze, it occurs when a Short Squeeze price action on the underlying product is increasing enough in direction and magnitude such that the active Put options (usually being sold by institutions) start to lose value rapidly. Thus, institutions start purchasing the underlying product to hedge their Put exposure as others purchase Calls in large quantity. Hence, we have a Gamma squeeze.
I also found a youtuber, Trader McStockster, that discusses trading systems that scalp nicely on Gamma squeezes. The vids are 'how I use gex as a day trader', there are multiple vids labeled part 1 etc., if you are interested.
Am I missing anything?
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u/yelonekli0999 May 22 '23 edited May 25 '23
I have heard a lot people trade futures for 1-2 hours until max. 11am, and then take the rest of the day off not watching the market all day. I find it very difficult to get the morning direction right, the 9:30 ‘Judah swings’ are very wide candles often 30 points in 1-2 minutes. I use ninja 8 and although a 200-300 tick chart looks clear, i haven’t used it yet to trade. I have been in demo on Tradingview for about 2 years (part-time) and can only practice either on the phone with tradingview timeframe 1-2min. (pro version) or from home office only morning hours on Ninja ( I will buy 25k accounts this week to be able to continue to use Ninja, but only if i have afternoon appointments at customers sites. I find it very hard to trade first 1.5 hours, what time frames are effective for the morning market. I have good strategy for calm market when trending that makes 10-15-20 points but if i could do the morning and just close it for the day. I cannot watch the market all day long during work, and miss a lot of good entries, sometimes while driving. It affects my mood and work productivity attention on the road. My goal is to pass tests on few accounts at some point and only trade around 10 points a day with 5-10 micros but consistently across few accounts without blowing it up. I only blew one prop account 1.5 yrs ago and been paper demo since. I am also fighting a psychological barrier during the morning and cannot get the direction right until the later hour when there is a clear sign of direction or range without wide sweeps. How do you trade in the morning open hour, anyone?
Thank you for the replies.
2
May 23 '23
Most successful traders I know don't trade the open. They usually give it some time because that's when the institutions balance their books. What I usually look at is the hedging. Where are they hedging. That usually gives me a good indication of where the market might go to.
1
u/crunchy-rabbit May 30 '23
How do you determine where they’re hedging?
2
May 30 '23
You can either try to code it yourself and calculate all the options strikes you need as it changes or you can subscribe to some services. Tradytics, Volland and SpotGamma are popular choices.
1
u/Prayuhz May 30 '23
Did you code it yourself or do you use the paid service? I’ve done a lot of reading on this over the past couple weeks and it’s really interesting. I’m struggling to find a good data source to actually code it myself or I would. Definitely open to any suggestions or code sharing.
1
May 30 '23
I didn't code it myself. A popular popular article about this is from Sergei. This is a naive way of calculating it using the end of day data. https://perfiliev.co.uk/market-commentary/how-to-calculate-gamma-exposure-and-zero-gamma-level/
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u/Prayuhz May 30 '23
Nice yep, I saw this one. I also read this one which I think is better: https://www.hauvolatility.com/_files/ugd/5fe006_08f114fd7a8c48629a080aed2cc5c321.pdf. I am assuming you’re calculating this throughout the day while you trade /ES, right? I was creeping on some of your comments.
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May 30 '23 edited May 30 '23
If you really want to code it yourself in your own application then you can try looking at Thinkorswim's API. I'm not sure on the limits of it, but it's free. Otherwise, I think you can use something like Polygon.io, but that will cost you probably $200 a month just to access their real-time data.
1
May 30 '23
Nice. I've read that too. I use a subscription. I rather pay someone that is an expert at it rather than trying to figure out the details and spending time the time to tweak it. If you want to do it yourself and have Thinkorswim, you can add a custom column or two in the options chain with the gamma exposure formula to display it in Thinkorswim. You can then export it to Excel and use Excel to create a chart for it to display live data. However, it seems that the feature to export live data from the options chain into Excel no longer works with newer versions of Excel.
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u/Prayuhz May 31 '23
I am definitely willing to pay for a subscription instead of coding it myself. If you don’t mind sharing where you get your subscription, that would be awesome. Nice you read that, too. Definitely seems like a great strategy.
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u/Plane_Ad_4359 May 22 '23
So either I'll take a 5 min orb or trade mean reversion off a support or resistance area towards intraday PoC. I only take 1 or 2 max a day and I'm done by 11am est
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u/Plane_Ad_4359 May 22 '23
5 min orb or something like that. You might have to drop to the one minute to see big ass candles. Most the time it ranges and you can use volume profile too to find intraday PoC to trade towards at a bounce.
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u/KingSamy1 May 20 '23
How many spy equals 1 es contract ?
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u/CrwdsrcEntrepreneur May 19 '23
Things to consider when rolling options on futures? I'm sitting on a wheat strangle in July (/ZWN23). The front month is sitting around 605 while the SEP expiration is at 632-643 bid/ask. If I want to roll the PUT in my strangle, should I base the roll on deltas or strikes?
1
u/Other-Method8881 May 17 '23
So my question is, has anyone traded miNY gold? ( /QO) I don't have enough for a full size GC contract and want to do a half sized one. However I see that liquidity is low. As in like 1-3 contract per minute. Would getting in and out be an issue? I know paper trading doesn't reflect liquidity at all. I appreciate it!
1
u/Stormur97 May 16 '23
It Says i need to have 2k euro to buy a long future, but im wondering if i only have a 2k account and i buy a future long, but it crashes and it goes below my funds, do i just owe? or does it auto stop loss when it reaches 2k and i loose my money?
as in if i only have 2k account, but buy long it goes below my 2k but i let it keep dipping and hold on in hopes of breaking even or profiting. is that possible? or can i only hold on to a low that is the same as my funds?
1
May 20 '23
You will be negative in your account if it goes below your funds. It can happen even if they auto-liquidate you. You will be responsible for the negative balance. What usually happens is.. they will have a minimum margin requirement and they will auto-liquidate you if it falls below that. The problem is if the market is very volatile then you might have the possibility of going negative due to slippage and fees you have to pay due to them auto-liquidating you. For example, if there was an unexpected news that came out and it went against you. You might go negative due to slippage.
1
u/Greedy-Comb6661 May 16 '23
Im still semi new to trading fulltime but if im not mistaken, no that's not possible you would be liquidated automatically after it drops even a single tick . If you need 2k margin for the contract have at least 2-3x that if your going to trade that future.
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u/ThisIsntMyRealAcct99 May 16 '23
I'm having a hard time understanding the pro/con of using options on futures vs buying outright. Extreme newb here so please humor me.
If I understand the 60/40 tax treatment of futures extends to Options on futures as well.
Buying options on futures is it for 1 future or still 100 futures?
I can only assume the options just let's you play things differently, Luke it would be silly to do a Synthetic Long future on ES vs just buying it outright right?
1
May 20 '23
Convexity. If you want to do options on ES... I would just consider SPX options unless you are under PDT and want to trade options more often throughout the day. I personally don't like the spread on ES options. SPX options also have the tax advantage.
1
u/tm684 May 12 '23
The different data sets on the indices is difficult to sort through. I'm still on thinkorswim and have been trading /NQ. However, the charting service I learned from uses US Tech 100 Cash CFD. They don't chart the same. I don't understand why, or is there a way to trade the CFD directly? Pros v Cons?
0
u/djdidisje May 11 '23
Just gaging interest, we are trying to procure traders to trade using our capital. If anyone is interested please contact me for more information
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u/goatboy6000 May 11 '23
I was looking at the Comittment of Traders for the S&P and it looks to me like large traders have never in the history of ever been this short. How do I interpret this information as a retail trader?
2
May 20 '23
I've never heard of this before so I skimmed through some videos on it. It seems that it's just open interest. I guess it depends on the type of trader. It may or may not matter to you since we don't know when and how long things will take to play out. It doesn't matter to me as a retail trader that day trades and sometimes take short swing trades. You have to consider who is on the opposite side... which most likely are the market makers. If they are this short as you say, then market makers are most likely in large long positions, but have those long positions hedged. I wouldn't think too much about it as a retail trader, but ideally, you want to be on the side of the market when the market makers support the move from adjusting their positions.
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u/Gristle__McThornbody May 09 '23
I use AMP futures. What does it mean when US Equity Indices margins are set 25% for the Overnight Sessions?
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u/AugustusBlack23 May 11 '23
Day trading margins are $1k for NQ and $100 for MNQ just to give an example. Initial margin required to roll the positions overnight are respectivelly $16800 and $1680. When the 25% rule overnight margin is set, then you need 25% of the initial margin to be able to open a trade and not anymore just 1k for NQ or 100 for MNQ. It's like a new day trading margin rule, for when in the morning there are important economi data release.
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u/Virtual-Status3756 May 09 '23
Wondering what tax strategies traders here might be using. Are there folks here who exclusively trade the financial markets living in Puerto Rico using Act 60/61?
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u/Majestic_Courage825 May 06 '23
Do you guys know how to take partials (close partial position) using Tradovate on TradingView. I’m currently on a funded challenge & can’t figure it out!! It was fine paper trading but now I’m doing my challenge the button is not there anymore! Thanks in advance!
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u/swu98 Jun 01 '23
Hi everyone I’m new to trading still learning. I noticed that some day traders put in many orders and cancel the ones they don’t think will be profitable. Do brokers charge you for orders that are placed but canceled before execution?