Well tuesday was interesting across all of the markets, to include the meats. The cash trade last week in the fed cattle market was at 84.50, and an average of the historical February basis would price the futures at around a buck higher at 85.50. Arbitrage opportunity?? We'll see how the cash trade and American equities hold up this week.
I have a spreadsheet program that I developed to help guage the day's price action before the cattle pit opens up at 9:00 a.m. It took me a little bit to get the weightings, and formulas adjusted and optimized, but this program (I named the "Live Cattle Daily Directional Indicator") has been accurate about 80% over the past month since I have started fielding it. It scores a handful of variables that are important in gauging the daily price action. You can see on the screenshot the basics like the s&p futures, $us index futures, and cot report figures, but there are some other variables that I'm going to keep on the "down low", as they're proprietary, and very valuable to the model. Anyhow, I just input all of the variables, and the program kicks out a score on the scale of -80 to +80. A positive score means the day will most likely be positve, and visa versa. The stronger the score(with regards to its pos. or neg. values) , the greater the amount of upside or downside in the day. A score of 0 means flat finish on the day. I have a proprietary variable that I use that really helps to predict (with uncanny accuracy) the dollar figure of upside or downside on the day. Look at the lower right of the spreadsheet. You can see that based off of the previous closing price of 84.45, the program called for minus 1.09 on the day. The pits (feb) opened at 83.70, now subtract 1.09 from 84.70 and you get 82.61. The pit closed at 82.55. This is all done premarket, BTW, that's why it's important, it's not some ex post facto bullshit. It's a forecaster.
I'm still refining it, but it works pretty damn well so far, so I won't refine it too much. Holy Grail?? No. Awesome, forward looking indicator with high win probability, YES.