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Corn had one of its big days today. The corn strategy versus the S&P surfer strategy reminds me of the hare and the tortoise…

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A few readers have asked me for my thoughts on the proposed extended trading hours for the grains traded at CME (starting May 21), generally seen as a response to the new grain contracts being launched by ICE. To tell the truth, I’m a bit disappointed. For years, I’ve enjoyed the fact that the grains had a distinct opening and a short market duration. Now they will begin to resemble other round the clock contracts like the S&P… I’ll still trade conventional hours initially until we see how the market volumes develop over the coming months.

(There has been a lot of opposition to the proposed change, to the extent that it may yet be delayed or even cancelled. )

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Fridays have not been kind to us recently.

I would like to take this opportunity to update you on our progress with the simulator. We have now reached the stage of having a working prototype which is in testing. While there are still a few problems, we hope to have these ironed out for release 1 to 2 months from now. For those TradeOnAUTO Pro customers who enjoy researching strategies, this will be an invaluable tool!

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A tough day in the other markets, but another win for the S&P Surfer. Clients who have remained focused on this market are doing very well. One email I received yesterday said that “ my account is up an astounding 52.60% in a little under six months! ” As always, the secret is to be consistent and to avoid over trading.

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I have just got off the phone to my ISP following an Internet interruption during today’s trading session. I am informed that upgrades are being made to my local telephone exchange. “To avoid disruption to the public, the upgrades are being done after midnight.” That is probably great for the majority of users in my area, but not for me. The first outage occurred at 9:48 AM (Chicago time) which is 48 min after midnight here on the Gold Coast, Australia.

In some ways it was a good test of the TradeOnAUTO reliability features in this situation, but clearly it disrupted my results. Here is what happened:

1. The wheat trade completed normally within the first few minutes of the trading session.

2. The soybeans trade entered the trade normally and started to trail the stop. The target and the stoploss orders were entered instantly so that, whatever happened, the trade was protected. When the outage occurred, the trailing stop was deactivated. Because the overall target was not achieved before the market turned down, the trade ended up as a loser in my account when the stop loss was eventually triggered. However, in the table below, I have shown what would have happened in a normal session when the trailing stop would have resulted in a small profit being achieved.

3. The S&P Surfer trade entered normally and the stop loss and target orders were set instantaneously. Because no trailing stop is used in this strategy, the outage did not affect the final result (a loss in my account). This was one of those occasions where some clients will have registered a win because our target was briefly touched. It will depend on whether your order was filled at the target price or not.

4. Because the outage struck before the corn entry was taken, TradeOnAUTO abandoned the corn trading session. That was unfortunate because this session was one of the big corn winners. In the table below, I have indicated the result that would have been expected had the session not been aborted.

This is the second session which has been disrupted. I didn’t notice the first time, but it has been pointed out to me that corn should have been a losing trade on April 30 (thanks Phil!). I have amended the tables to reflect this.

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Ouch! That was a disappointing set of trades on the last trading day of the month. Overall, the S&P Surfer has remained the pick of the bunch.

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A quiet day, with corn backsliding a bit…

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The final line in this table wasn’t updating correctly for the last couple of days – corrected now. Note that zero entries in the “Today” results indicate a no trade day for the strategy.

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A nice result for wheat today as the market moved South.

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Corn got back into the black after a horror start to the month…

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One of those rare trending days so favourable to the corn strategy.

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