Anyone found the emini s&p 500 not as volatile lately?

I had been trading the emini s&p 500 futures in a simulator for over a month now, especially during power hour and found it incredibly volatile but nowadays there seems to be a great decline in trading activity, has anybody else noticed this?

The 'flash crash' of May 6th changed the way people play the ES. The DOM has been a lot thinner since that time. Perhaps the risk managers have told people to pull back a bit because of the chance of an unexpected, algo driven spike in either direction. Perhaps a few algos have been switched off permanently.

Add to that the fact that September is typically a thinner market anyway - it's picked up a little since the US labor days vacation & the DOM is thickening up a bit.

sopodo said:

I had been trading the emini s&p 500 futures in a simulator for over a month now, especially during power hour and found it incredibly volatile but nowadays there seems to be a great decline in trading activity, has anybody else noticed this?

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All the disasters have been discounted Greece, Spain and ring fenced. No crises lasts for ever.

It's trending and has been for over 2 weeks. Trading volumes are ok IMO although underlying equity volumes are awful. Are you looking at both Sep and Dec contracts for volume? It's rolling over right now if you weren't aware.

Guys many thanks for all the replies

robster970 said:

It's trending and has been for over 2 weeks. Trading volumes are ok IMO although underlying equity volumes are awful. Are you looking at both Sep and Dec contracts for volume? It's rolling over right now if you weren't aware.

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Hi robster,

I just switched over, thanks for the tip. This new contract at the end of the day had just over 1,930,000 contracts being traded. Do you know how high that figure will get?

I don't know if I am mistaken, but can you confirm. About a month ago or a bit longer the September contract daily volume was around 2,500,000 contracts being traded. Is that correct?

During rollover the volumes and open interest get a bit blurred IMO. You have day traders that switch to the new contract almost immediately and then swing/position traders roll-off over the next 8 days so I don't think the sum of the two contracts in this period really clarifies things.

When it's busy and there's only really one contract in play, I reckon 2.5 to 3.0m is a busy day. OI settles around 2.8m and goes up and down +/- 150k. 1.9m is mediocre and 1.5m is low.

You should also reference the main SP500 contract to see what's going on too.

So other things to note. NYSE volumes doubled (it's usually busy on quarterly options expiration day) so they were back up at a healthy 2bn shares traded. SP500 main contract volumes traded yesterday were very low tho. COT this week showed a bias net long of 2% for commercials.

Make of that what you will, I'm reading uncertainty into it.