What Futures Instruments to trade ?

When you say you want to have more "diversification" what do you mean? Are you thinking in terms of offsetting positions to decrease risk, or do you just mean you'd like to increase you number of trading opportunities?

If you want to apply similar strategies, you may find that indicies and fixed income (bonds, bunds, eurodollars, etc.) provide you similar type opportunies at forex. They all tend to react to closely related influences.

If you want a completely different trading profile, then moving in to commodities would be the thing.

Rhody Trader said:

When you say you want to have more "diversification" what do you mean? Are you thinking in terms of offsetting positions to decrease risk, or do you just mean you'd like to increase you number of trading opportunities?

If you want to apply similar strategies, you may find that indicies and fixed income (bonds, bunds, eurodollars, etc.) provide you similar type opportunies at forex. They all tend to react to closely related influences.

If you want a completely different trading profile, then moving in to commodities would be the thing.

Click to expand...

I want to stay with my trading style since I am very happy with it, but I am looking to trade a wider variety of instruments. Since I "grew up" on forex futures, I know very little about the performance of other things.

Then I would look at ES and the like, and/or TY and other similar instruments (Bunds, Gilts, etc.). You could also look at ED, but there can be long period of very low intraday volatility in that market. There's more price action in the longer-term fixed income sector.

Other futures instruments besides currencies with viable liquidity, etc are
US Indexes ER2, YM, (and ES, NQ, etc)
Other Indexes London, Europe, Tokyo, HongKong, Singapore, etc
Treasuries TY, US, FV, etc (Note: These 'react' at the same times currencies do to reports, etc.)
Metals GC, HG
Energy CL, etc
Ags S, W, C, SM (all on CBOT)
Meats LC
Softs CC, SB, (KC)

While a few others may be on the cusp (CT, PB, etc), in general, all the other contracts thin out pretty quickly.

Currencies are still among the best for 'dollars per day' (ATR, volatility, etc)
It is picking up for Indexes (finally)
Treasuries US very similar to currencies
All the others have lower general $ATR's than IMM, indexes, and US (and of course all have occasional huge days, thrusts, and swings.)

These other markets may or may not be amenable (with or without tweaks and modifications) to your style and methods. Also appropriate chart timeframes can be all over the board for the list above. Indexes can go down to extremely short timeframes while some of the others on the list may be better traded from weekly charts... ie you may not be able to directly apply your stuff unchanged to these other instruments on the same timeframes and parameters you use in the currencies.

hth

zdo

Look at Grains W, C, S, SM.
Softs KC, CO, SB, CT
Metals GC, SI and Interest Rates ZB, TY, ED,

Hi,
I have just opened an online Trading account to trade in commodities. I am
Trading stocks for some time but no commodities. I have brentcrude, sugar, gold
silver and furnance oil on my radar. My style is based on technicals analysisand elliottwave
I will be trading only futures. Kindly suggest , what markets and methods should i
follow in commodity markets.
Regards to you all.

Good luck