Spread Charting

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

Spread Charting

What kind of charting service / software and technical analysis is required for following a spread trade?

I use FSxtra from FutureSource for my trading FutureSource.com

It's rather cheap ($69.95 per month plus exchange fees) and offers everything I need.

BriteFutures.com offers FREE End –of-day spread charts:

Markus
Spread Trading.pdf
---o0o---

Let me go on record here about Seasonal Spreads Charts

First Jerry Toepke's Weekly Spread Commentary usually selects two upcoming spread strategies, reviews their seasonal dynamics, provides current fundamental and technical perspective, and discusses their potential risk/reward and any relevant alternative trading ideas. Along with access to the relevant historical data and updates the best seasonal spread charts in the world daily. (Cost is $45 for 13 weeks.)

Second Barchart.com Custom Spreads is a pure web based charting program that allows you to make spread charts of hundreds of commodities markets throughout the world, with quotes, charts, statistics, trend analysis and over 40 technical analysis studies on every active Spread. Online features include advanced charting, portfolio management, and unlimited historical data downloads. (Costs are $20 per month.)

-ooO-(GoldTrader)-Ooo- [URL=http://www.mrci.com/whysea.pdf]Why Seasonals Work.pdf[/URL]

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

H2O 05-18-03 11:09 AM>have you tried McSpread?

It can be used for both commodities and stocks.

Aloha Water,
What I would like to know is what does “computer based software,” like McSpreadcost in time? When traders realize the freedom they have being financial independent how can they possibly develop a system resident on just one machine?

How many hours a day does it take to download, manage and error-free the data?
How many hours a week do you have to do maintenance on chart data?
What happens when you have to reformat your hard drive?
Are you restricted to a limited number of computers?
Can you trade on the road?
Europe, Asia the United States?
Can you trade from major airports?
You know stop in any Internet Café or public library and trade manage your accounts.

When you are moderately successful I am sure your time will be worth
$100.00 an hour.

What I would like to know is what does McSpread or any other way to get Spread Charts cost in time?

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

Originally posted by J-Law 10-22-02 06:31 PM Spread Trading >
I was also on the www.mrci.com site but was completely overloaded with information.

J-Law that is one of the reasons many of us use Moore’s WSC! Weekly Spread Commentary. We get about two long-term spreads a week.

J-Law >Does that give you a different risk/reward than long the front and short a back month ???
If I'm with you want the differential to narrow, right ???

I guess by know by now that we always put the long contracts first. So we are always bullish chart wise. When we are bearish we switch the contracts around. So a bear spread, looks like a bull spread.

So yes any change will alter the risk/reward of a spread.

J-Law >I opened up a BarChart acct.

An interesting thing about Barchart charts is that they allow Stochastics to be used on Spreads. I use the Modified Stochastics with 5,3.

Markus >here are my criterions for choosing spreads:

1. Margin requirements
One of the main advantages of spread-trading is the reduced margin requirement. Therefore I am just choosing spreads, which are recognized by the exchanges. That limits the amount of possible spreads significantly.

2. Profitability
A spread should be able to give at least $200 profit within a day or two. Using this method you will limit the amount of suitable spreads further down.

3. Liquidity
I would like to see a volume of 2,000 contracts/day in the underlying future contracts. Sometimes I am happy with 1,500.

I depend on WSC! for choosing my Calendar spreads. Jerry gives us initial spreads to catch a trend then one or two pyramids to the same trend. $100.00 per week per spread is about par.

Whatsinmyfuture >MRCI has a plethora of spread trading ideas for its subscribers. The Weekly Spread Commentary (WSC)! by MRCI is a great source of ideas and that too at a very economical price.

Jerry Toepke's comments are very informative, and I can say that I learnt more from reading his commentaries than I learnt by spending $2000+ on books and worthless ebooks and courses.

I was at a $2,000.00 a week course when I learned about Moore Research!

J-Law >you monitor your trades on an end of day basis, correct ???

Me two. I check Barchart after the market closes. Later I check WSC! and my brokers online statement before I send in orders and go to sleep.

Markus > 10-29-02 05:33 AM
Liquidity: I am using the Volume data of the underlying future contracts. You .. can check the volume on the web.

Moore Research keeps a free site where you can check Volume.

ADX_trader > It seems there are many combinations, which one is the most popular?

New traders should stay with Calendar spreads featured in the WSC!.

Gann > There are many combinations but the 1e step is to find combinations with high correlation, like T-Bonds against 10Y Tnotes etc.

 

[pretzel]

I used to have candles for spread charts with QCharts but I switched to eSignal. Now I can get only a line chart. Any suggestions, or is a line chart good enough? Or, can eSignal do candle charts for spreads?

pretzel

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

pretzel >05-19-03 12:28 PM is a line chart good enough? <

With spreads close only charts are all we have. Joe Ross’s “Spreads & Seasonals,” teaches how to use line charts to trade spreads. If you’ll look around you will see some of the charts we use posted in this Forum.

So yah OK line charts are good enough..

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

Aloha Candletrader,
I hope you have had a nice holiday and are still short cattle. Please forgive me. I do not like to keep new spread traders waiting. Christmas, no excuse.

candletrader >... in terms of brokers and chart providers, which do you, recommend in order to cover the largest number of futures spreads.

If you plan to do, your own numbers crunching you would need to look for trade relationships in all the markets that can handle your trading volume. You can see by the methodology we have been using that we rely heavily on research used by the major exchanges CBOT, CME, and Merck. What I think is going on is that the exchanges have research done for there own purposes. In order to expel any claim of using inside information, for a nominal charge (practically free), this information is leaked to the public (us), in the very usable form of Spread Charts.

If you plan to crunch your own. The blueprint for how to do it is in Jake Berstein’s writings. If you want an example of the state of the art, see Moore Research out of Eugene.

I will start by sending you a few charts that really should be a chart reader’s holy grail.

Originally, I did not think it mattered who your broker was. To get around a lot of things we are trading as the material was tested, End of Day!

Later we found that it will help if you have a broker who has spread traders with open profitable spread positions.

We do not get any trading information from anyone with a conflict of interest, least of all Brokers.

But we do depend on the broker to give guidance in how to place the order and what exchange to place the order on.

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

candletrader > What kind of orders do you send in?

See our posts about: Spread Trading: How to place a stop order

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

ig0r >I'm currently in the process of reading all of the threads on ET on the subject,

Please post any questions, when you have them. Don’t wait and forget.

ig0r >On some of the charts that you posted on ET, the data on the chart would be days ahead of the day that umade the post, how can that be?

What you really want to find is charts that have data ahead of the day you are reading them.

ig0r > Is it a link to an img file for a particular spread chart that is updated daily?

In the lower right side, corner you will see a link that says • Quote • . You can use this as a guide to personilize your posts.

ig0r > I do not believe that I can trade any commodity futures with (my current broker) I can't trade (Seasonal) calendar spreads on the e-minis.

Gary it will help if you have a broker who has spread traders with open profitable spread positions. You can depend on an experienced spread broker to give guidance to you on how to place the orders. Usually we trade them as tested. End-of-day.

 

[nkhoi]

Quote from pretzel:

I used to have candles for spread charts with QCharts but I switched to eSignal. Now I can get only a line chart. Any suggestions, or is a line chart good enough? Or, can eSignal do candle charts for spreads?

pretzel

yes

 

[-ooO-(GoldTrade]

Quote from Darren
I wanted your candid opinion on an "overlooked" trading methodology. technicalanalysiswealth

OK here is the scoop from Pipeline, Oahu, Hawaiian Islands.

1. When I started trading Gold, I would get the London Fixes off of the radio and make my charts by hand. This worked very well. No complaints.

2. Jim Sibbett used to mail me charts with the Demand Index. These we would update daily until the following weeks charts arrived.

3. Later we joined T.A.G. A few hundred of us paid a couple of grand each to hire a guy in New Orleans, to hire people to write software for us. This was called Compu Trac. It was the most Commodity Trader friendly product I have ever used. It could tell us our stop losses 5 periods ahead. It let us adjust Parobolic to start at swing extremes. The programmers did just about anything we asked except pattern recognition. That is we did not have enough processing power available to read Bar Chart patterns.

When the S&P stock market crowd came along they outnumbered us thousands to one. My opinion is it then shifted more toward entertainment than increasing as a more useful tool for Futures traders because of the stock market traders..

4. SuperCharts took over as the leader for end-of day trading until they (Omega) stopped offering updates. I have friends here in the Islands who still use SuperCharts. The thing all of these now antiquated programs had is common was the wasted time, gathering and maintaining clean data from CSI.

5. Online charting... I have written extensively about Web based charting on the web. Most currently in Elite probably under Spread Charting

The Luxury of Online charts means we no longer have to procure and maintain data. We can call up charts on anything from many different sources on the Web, and see what we need to know to make our own decisions. Research companies email us seasonal and whatever else we need in the way of charts or commentary daily.

It is very easy to travel, work off line, and just trade in general when you are not tied to any physical location. Traders can trade just as easily on Vacation in Bali as in Kansas City. I am writing this on a plane going over Reno NV.

Supply and Demand is a very simple thing. If you can read and take action from a chart, you will find little need for more than a few indicators. If you can read a bar chart directly & take action. You will have little need for every fly by night system that comes along. ÒTharp,Ó in his excellent book. Puts forth the well known proposition that the more indicators or filters that you use the more opportunities that you probably will miss.

Darren the Ad that you sent me was for

ÒCustom Technical Analysis Indicators & Trading Resources for Omega TradeStation in EasyLanguage,Ó

Omega Tradestation is a program that if you become addicted to it you are like a patient on life support. It is like intravenous market support for system developers. Tradestation carries technical analysis and news directly into your nervous system. It brings in nourishment so that you can make healthy decisions as well us tons of unnecessary information to upset you. Those who are true converts cannot live without it.

Easylanguage is a way to write new studies and test them. Very time consuming. Very expensive in terms of time that could be spent at the beach. Results are unlikely for a new trader, to be better than learning to read a bar chart yourself. John Hills work is particularly good on reading chart patterns.

Really you have to ask yourself. Are you going to become a trader like Jesse Livermore in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,

or do you want to develop a temporal nebulous trading system using Easylanguage.

As far as finding an "overlooked" trading methodology that works Good Luck!

JoeÕs Book on Spreads and Seasonals will be WAY more profitable.