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This question might probably sound weird to veterans here, but coming from the pure "stocks" trading to 24/hours futures I'm a bit confused by the daily #ES chart.
Maybe my case is vendor related (Ninja/Kinetick data), but when I plot a daily streaming chart of #ES, it seems to include 24hours data for the current day.... not sure about previous days. So at 9:30 EST when the stocks market opens the daily #ES candle of the current day is already showing full body and wicks I guess from overnight data.
In general, how am I supposed to read a daily @ES chart? How are the open-close supposed to be calculated?
Are all candles derived from 24 hours data, or from stock market hours?
Because in stocks, even if you have a pre and post-market hours, they are NOT accounted for daily chart calculations.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
There are a few ways around this.
1) set you charts for the RTH open hours
2) use the fat tails indicator for close of yesterday,RTH open, high of yesterday, and low of yesterday ( what I do)
but the data is still correct these markets are active almost 24 hours a day, what you need to keep in mind is if you are trading the US session where is the price from the previous session. Lots of times we go up or down over night and the US session likes to bring price back to the mean.
-P
"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie"-Miyamoto Musashi
I made a daily chart on ninja that only displays RTH by creating a minute chart using an aggregation period of 1440. This is the number of minutes in a day. You also have to set trading hours to US Index Future RTH (as pictured). It seems like a clunky way to do it, but it gets the job done. Someone probably has a better way.
ES traded around the clock (almost), you want to see all data not just from 9:30-4pm data, here is the chart with small intervals = 9:30-4pm data, as you can see ES also moved big outside small intervals
The question is actually what do you want to see and what do you want to use in making decisions. You can adjust your trading platform to show as much as you want to take into account while trading. Some traders don't care about the pre and post trading, and some regard it as important.
Roughly, you can break up the full 24-hour day into three "sessions," the Asian session (from the end of the NY session until about 2:00 or 3:00 AM US Eastern Time), the "European session" (beginning about 3:00 AM ET and running until about 11:00 AM ET), and the US (or NY) session, beginning 9:30 AM ET and ending 16:00 PM ET. Note the European session overlaps the NY session in the morning hours in New York.
These sessions correspond to the different groups of investors/traders who are active principally during these times.
You can clearly see the influence of these different populations by looking at both the volume and the price movement or ES during the day. Here are the last few days on a half-hour chart:
In this chart, you will see the same pattern every day. After the US stock market closes, trading volume is slow as, in the US evening hours, Asian traders take charge (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia); they are not heavily into American equity markets. In the early morning hours (again, Eastern US Time), European traders, who do have some interest in the US market, start to come in, although their main activity will be after 9:30 ET, when liquidity is high.
There is a huge volume spike at the NY open, and volume is still fairly high until the European traders begin to leave (and Americans begin to have lunch .) Then there is a spike near the close and everything falls off again.
This pattern will happen every single day of the year, every year, with only occasional variations in case of particular events (such as big stock crashes. )
So what does this mean to a trader? This has taken a long time to get to a simple point, but the "24 hour" trading day has a structure in terms of when positions are being taken and by whom. During the RTH hours, some of the trades opened before the NY open will still be open and will be in European hands, as will some taken by Europeans after the open, and these traders will be making decisions to hold or close, generally through the "European session," into the late morning/midday hours in New York. So support and resistance, and other price features, from those trades may still have relevance, especially in the first few RTH hours. This is why some traders use price levels, moving averages, trendlines, VWAP, and other tools that include the ETH trading.
On the other hand, other traders have found, or have decided, that it is enough to only consider the high-activity hours of RTH. Which is best? they are both "best." Traders of both types have been profitable. It depends on what you want to be looking at.
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This may be more than anyone wanted to know. I sometimes get like that.
But anyone who is new to futures, or who hasn't worked through what these patterns of activity mean to them, may be able to make use of these charts and all this verbiage....
Thanks @bobwest.... never thought about applying FOREX timezone logic to anything other than FOREX.... but what you say make sense.
As for the daily chart, I was more interested to what's most widely used, to make sure to be looking at what most people are looking... but I guess it is not that simple on 24h market.....
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I know this is NT focused but for reference Tradestation has two symbols. @ES includes the overnight session and @ES.D is just RTH. Unfortuntely the .D suffix only works for equity index futures, so there is no @CL.d for example.
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