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CME "Trade Against a Pro" Trading Challenge - March 3-8
Trading: Emini ES, Emini RTY (TF), Crude CL, Eurex DAX, Euronext CAC40, EuroFX 6E, and Hang Seng HSI
Posts: 47 since Mar 2011
Thanks Given: 125
Thanks Received: 61
Hi snax,
Did you compete in the CME Group trading competition. How did you do in the tournament ?
I competed and had a final rank of 144th out of 1680 traders. The best ranking I reached was Thursday night a 94th but I didn't trade at all on Friday (last day of the competition)...reason for the drop from 94th to 144th. Further, I missed two other big moving price action trading days due to personal reasons.
Yet, my performance was still a top 10% performance. I mainly traded Emini ES futures and Brent Oil BZ futures.
Also, I signed up to be alerted to any future competition. I'm interested in trading other products like commodities. The one thing I learned is that the trading competition (simulator) takes away from your real money trading if you're not good at multi tasking two different trade execution platforms at the same time.
Thank you for checking in, congrats on your trading! I see you are an /ES trader so I bet you were taking a lot of short positions to finish that high!
I did very badly in the tournament, (I only made a couple trades on sunday evening), because I realized the tournament uses live data but my journaled daily trading (for now) is sim-traded (on the regular cme-simulator) with delayed data. I decided that the journaling and daily work I am putting in on the sim-trading is more important for me now, and I didn't want to peak at live data and be trying to trade my current strategies on delayed data at the same time so there was a conflict.
I could have traded my current strategy using 1 contract, etc but we probably both know that wouldn't be too fun in the tournament :-) ...So basically I opened up a couple positions and held them without looking for the week. Had they been short I would have been happy.
Congrats again, this was a tough market to be trading /ES and you did quite well.
What do you like about Brent Crude as opposed to WTI Crude oil?
Trading: Emini ES, Emini RTY (TF), Crude CL, Eurex DAX, Euronext CAC40, EuroFX 6E, and Hang Seng HSI
Posts: 47 since Mar 2011
Thanks Given: 125
Thanks Received: 61
Hi,
I agree...trading the Emini ES futures is a tough market right now. Luckily, the VIX has been slowly increasing during the trading competition duration...setting up some decent movement in the Emini Futures but most of it thanks to ECB comments out of Europe about poor growth or lowered growth expectations.
Yet, I thought it was odd to see a lot of traders on the leaderboard were in fact trading the Emini ES futures too.
One guy in particular on the leaderboard told me he's basically a sim trader and barely venture into any real money trading during the duration of the simulation competition.
That's the one thing I found difficult...trying to balance the trading between simulation trading competition and real money trading at the same time or at least during the same duration on the CME Group Trading Challlenge. I myself only traded 2 1/2 days of the 5 day competion but mainly due to personal reasons with my kids (spring break vacation for them).
Simply, I was only able to day trade during the trading competition...too afraid to put on a swing trade and walk away from the computer to hang out with the kids.
As for the Brent Oil BZ futures (NYMEX)...its the benchmark for Oil futures and it still represents about 2/3 of the world's Crude Oil. Also, I do some intermarket analysis between WTI Crude CL futures versus Brent Oil BZ futures but its been a very long time since I've traded it with real money. Thus, I thought trading BZ futures during the trading competition would help me become familiar with it again before I venture into real money trading the BZ futures.
Simply, when I begin trading Brent Oil BZ futures or WTI Crude CL futures...I will trade both...bouncing back n forth between the two depending upon the intermarket analysis.
Thanks again about the trading competiton notification. I had forgotten about it after a few friends had told me about it.
So I just took a look at the leaderboard. the two traders in 9th & 10th place had totals of 2 trades each one in /ES, one in /NQ, those were pure short plays right off the opening bell sunday evening and they never looked back. I think the second place person took advantage of a few of the reversals with the 18 trades, although I don't know if the leaderboard actually lists all the products you traded or just your "favorites" or most traded.
The 1st-place trader did a great job of managing big moves in precious metals, though using products I wouldn't feel comfortable with live, due to their lower daily volume (/PAM9 had 4,191 contracts traded friday, /PLJ9 with 19,972 total volume).
