Ideal long and short set ups- if one does not want to hold a trade for hours. There needs to be some movement to have an opportunity. When somethng is balancing- taking the other side of a FLUSH down and FLUSH up makes sense to me.

@mfbreakout

Thank you for the chart(s) it makes me think

Looking at an H1 chart for a long it's there but I'm not sure "just yet," esp since the short traded first today (Globex.)

-Bill

EDIT

I'd like to see if she can get down into the 4850 area, then make a decision from there etc yadda yadda

Devil Man 

perfect for a trade... Short Crude @49.19, below VWAP. looking for strong move lower but price has to break 48.91 PW-VAL ...had a controlling bar on the 1440 and a gap to move lower at the open sunday night. My targets loosley speaking will be looking for 46.90 area lots of noise there. My stop loss is 49.49 Anybody do 6,8 or even 10 ticks stop loss for crude is suicide. No Bullshit. Daily and Weekly VWAPS suggest a downward bias...daily and weekly pvots suggest and upward bias however, the weekly Central pivot were defefended as well as was the Daily Pivot Decision Point and Central Pivot. @tturner86 you have any thoughts on this? Anyone else? Johnny

Can you post a chart I am away from NT at the moment?

e4williams 

1. I have been trading oil with ETF's and may want to trade futures directly, apparently one has to buy a contract for 1000 barrels. I've read this but I think I need some verbal communication for this to sink into my head. So this means that if oil is trading at 50, in order to enter a trade you must buy a contract for $50,000? And enter a trade with allotments of 50,000 on your capital??

Hulk 

You are referring to the notional amount and it works differently in futures than in stocks. Rather than put up the notional amount, the clearing broker requires that you put up a margin amount to be able to trade a futures contract. The margin is much less than the notional and is different depending upon the broker you clear through. There are 2 types of margin with most brokers - a day trading margin and a swing (overnight) trading margin. So technically, you are borrowing money from your clearing broker to trade futures.

Nobody has mentioned it yet so I will mention QM the Crude Oil eMini. Half the size of CL (500 barrels) and it trades several thousand a day. Big disadvantage to CL is the 5c/bbl tic ~ $25. When charting QM don't chart QM - chart CL. It might not trade as much as CL but the market is there all the time 1 tic wide - HFT guys keep it in line - so liquidity is there to trade, even if charts do not show the prints.

e4williams 

2. What happens when the contracts roll over into the next month? And you are in the middle of a trade. Does the contract you are holding for the prior month automatically rollover into the next month?

Hulk 

Technically, if you have an open position upon expiration of a futures contract, you are obligated to the deliver or receive the underlying physical commodity. Some traders will do this if they wanted to buy or sell the physical commodity. When this happens, the exchange matches the buying and selling counterparties and thats when the notional value of the commodity gets exchanged. But most of us usually roll our position from one to the next month. So if you are long April, you would sell april and buy may at the same time and roll over your long position into may before april expires. From a mark-to-market perspective, it would not make any difference other than instead of being exposed to one month, you are now exposed to the next month market.

Interesting thing about QM is that it's financial settle so if you take it to expiry (not sure why you would though) there's no physical. Should point out QM expires the day before CL.

China this past weekend

Morning Markets: European shares dip from 7-year highs as Chinese rate cut lifts Asian markets - BNN News

Kind of surprised /CL didn't have a stronger reaction or already priced in etc

I think I'm going to give up on my Forex Factory calendar and use Investing dot com. They only problem w/ the latter is it loads a a bunch of BS and slows down my Firefox when using multiple tabs (I guess easy enough to work around.) Point being is Investing eco calendar has far more depth than FF

Maybe give up on Firefox esp since they're a huge advocate of net neutrality,,,, but I do not like MS

Drats, decisions to be made

-Bill

EDIT

I didn't look prior to typing this but FF didn't even list the rate decision, what a POS

WilleeMac 

China this past weekend Morning Markets: European shares dip from 7-year highs as Chinese rate cut lifts Asian markets - BNN News Kind of surprised /CL didn't have a stronger reaction or already priced in etc I think I'm going to give up on my Forex Factory calendar and use Investing dot com. They only problem w/ the latter is it loads a a bunch of BS and slows down my Firefox when using multiple tabs (I guess easy enough to work around.) Point being is Investing eco calendar has far more depth than FF Maybe give up on Firefox esp since they're a huge advocate of net neutrality,,,, but I do not like MS Drats, decisions to be made -Bill EDIT I didn't look prior to typing this but FF didn't even list the rate decision, what a POS

only thing it doesnt mention for crude news is the rig count i think? or are you talking all news for all mkts?

@madLyfe

No sir just referencing econ news in general

It seems most(?) folks reference FF instead of Investing. The reason I have FF on my bookmarks tab is I can give it a quick scan and doesn't bog down my browser

Forex Calendar @ Forex Factory

Economic Calendar - Investing.com

And ironically you ask about rig count. I signed up for email alerts and it hit my gmail inbox on Friday at 1300ET

Nothing exciting about the rig count email that you can't get at their website, so I guess it's just a heads up kind of thing

-Bill

@WilleeMac,

Not sure what you're looking for in a calendar, but I've gotten good use out of this:

2015 Economic Calendar

Bob.

SMCJB on Feb 25th 

The chart below shows the "Prompt Butterfly" (ie Month 1 - 2x Month 2 + Month 3) since Jan 1st 2014. As you can see, for the first half of last year, despite prices being high, and spreads also being high, the butterflies were continually negative, meaning spreads where in contango. Then in July/August last year that phenomenon changed and butterflies went positive. (Prompt Crude Prices peaked at $106.91 on 13-Jun-14 excluding expiration). Interestingly, despite the market dropping 50% the butterflies stayed that way - until this week! Note that this is not an expiration issue - March only just expired - and suddenly the JKM fly has plummeted with a month to go before expiry.

SMCJB on Feb 27th 

Front fly settled -51c last night and currently trading -65c, That's the lowest a front fly has traded in a long long time

The front fly (JKM) widened even further on Friday, settling at -68, but today it is in 33c and currently printing -35c but has a high print of -28c which is +40c on the day!
Wish I knew what this all meant. The second fly (KMN) has remained stable through all of this, so I wonder if this is all something to do with April CL and not a (reversing of the) term structure shift like we saw last summer before the puke.

@bobwest

Thank you

Interesting how not all calendars are inclusive, ie Fed speakers noted on this one but not that one and Gallup on that one and not this one etc

-Bill