Quote from JimmyJam:
Geat journaling Pabst, a lot of traders can benefit from what you're doing here, just by taking your trades and reviewing them (if anyone even thinks about trading as many instruments as you're listing here) as well as looking over the various trades and trying to piece together how they would do it with good money management.
Which leads me to a couple of questions.
How can you realistically keep track of all o these markets and trade them with the highest edge possible?
I would think that tracking more than 3 or 4 (out of all the markets out there) would become fairly difficult, unless you were partially automated.
Also, what is the point of trading redundant markets?
If you break markets down, pick a Financial, a Note, an Energy and maybe a Currency and/or an Agriculture I would think that would be a pretty sophisticated futures trading portfolio, and would be relatively easy to keep tabs on once you get in the groove.
Just some thoughts.
Good trading,
Jimmy Jam
Thanks for your interest in my journal Jimmy Jam. Try saying that a few times
really fast. 
Now back to my soapbox about
edge. Since 1982 99.99% of my trades have been in just 3 markets, Bonds, Eurodollars and NQ. As a local in the former two markets I enjoyed that mythical floor traders edge. In addition I knew everything there was to know about fixed income markets, i.e. the yield curve, corporate issuance, auction levels, economic releases and who the players were and what motivated them. At some point in the 90's, perhaps the fallout from LTCM or perhaps because of the cornering effect from Asian Central Banks, I found the credit markets to become less predictable than in earlier periods. Unfortunately it was only after losses of over a million bucks that I reached that epiphany.
In 2002 I started trading NQ because I liked the transparency of the underlying cash market. Even though I didn't make a dime trading it (I lost probably 30k in 4 years) I had lots of fun. If I'd bitten the bullet and leased an IOM I could have made a go of it (my commissions were in the 10's of thousands each year) but alas I tried to stay retail and bot's have cleared away what used to be a nice tape racing "edge."
These days I'm not sure if product specialization and the specific knowledge inherent constitute anything beyond a wee intellectual edge. Yea, I notice my Bond trading is the best thing I do but IMO that's just been random luck and not because I actually know what I'm doing.
My counter argument with myself is that from a micro perspective traditional commodities have the
least amount of available fundamental data. A guy can sit down and trade EUR with ED and Euribor quotes and probably figure out a way to scalp EUR successfully. There's no way that Beans can offer a tell of such type. Let alone Coffee or Cocoa.
Hence commodities for the short term trader are edgeless.
I think in
most cases though we can assume short term trading is edgeless for those who aren't directly trading against disadvantaged retail clients. So I'm trying to take shots devoid of edge, lol.
As far as correlated markets: Here's the dope. I like to look at multiple items within an "asset" class.
Currencies: BP, SF, EUR
Grains: Beans, Corn and Cotton (CT isn't a grain but it shares land with the others). I've never traded a contract of Wheat in my life and I follow the old adage, "gentlemen don't trade Oats".
Fixed Income: The entire Treasury curve as well as Europe (I lack Eurex and LIFFE quotes and it's a detriment)
Indices: All of 'em.
Spreads give fantastic information. Look at today in grains. Corn being lower says something bearish but Beans being strong relative to Corn speaks volumes. The market's saying "great planting weather equaling an abundance of Corn with Beans not going into the ground as aggressively." You can get that skinny easily from spreads.
Multiple markets in a class also give trading opportunities to go with the strong or weak hand. There's been times where you could be short YM and add in a strong market and be able to get out ok on a decent rotation during a period when shorts in NQ or ER2 would rip your head off. Or visa versa. If a guy was bullish on the dollar the past two years and shorted JY he's up a fortune whereas if a dollar bull shorted AUS he's toast.
Monitoring is tough and I need to develop rules and automate to some degree even if it's idea generation rather than actual trade entry.
I'm a work in progress. Even after 25 years.
