02 January 2013

CME Globex New Year Holiday Trading Hours

  • All my trading is done in the Futures markets. I do not trade the cash markets even though it is the cash charts I normally base my trade entries and exits on. [Reason : Futures is so much cleaner eg no funding issues with clearer, transparent and no quarrel with bad stops executed, etc].
  • In my many years of trading, I do not recall ever coming across a situation when the Asian cash markets are open for trading and there is a huge parallel time gap during which  Globex is closed. Until today ...
  • For 02Jan13 trade date, CME Globex opens at 0500 Chicago time = 1900 Singapore time. Thus Globex hours today is missing the ENTIRE Asian trading session. 
  • This is unusual. I thought that always on holidays, there is a Chicago night session which covers almost all of the next day's Asian session.
  • Does anyone know if this has always been the case? Because I do not recall any instance of this at all in previous years. Please leave a comment here or email me if you can enlighten me on this, for future reference.
  • In this case, no real harm done as I only have a JYH3 position on the correct side. Could have been a real disaster. 
  • My only concern now is what to do with my ECH3 buy stop-in limit at 1.3284 (=buy stop EUR/USD @ 1.3275). Perhaps I will pull that and turn it into a limit buy order below the current market. (EUR/USD now @ 1.3267, having made a high of 1.3298 thus far in Asia today, so my stop-in would have been triggered had the futures been open).

2 comments:

Taichiseal said...

Cancelled buy stop-in. Executed order myself.

Bought ECH3 @ 1.3255 = EUR/USD @ 1.3245.

So CME Globex shortened hours worked in my favor in this case. Questionable whether I should be buying at this level given that the daily triangle breakout (1.3275) seems to have failed. Will watch this closely and change my mind quickly if need be.

Taichiseal said...

Stopped out at 1.3157.

Life of trade .. 6 hours .. think this is 3rd trade in a row going long EUR/USD already. Maybe time to move on to something else.