Disliked{quote} A Very Good Day Pt-5 The News or Red Data Days Most red data releases are benign. Some are volatile. Sometimes one that hadn't amounted to much before suddenly goes BOOM. The moral of the red data story is: Be FLAT. It. Is. As. Simple. As. That. My broker has id'd these four as special. The margin is increased to 25% of the hold margin starting the night before. CPI PPI NFP FOMC This past week was the FOMC and the NFP. Red data has become more of a nuisance anymore. Due to it's potential unpredictability it is best to stay out. Most times...Ignored
This market shuts down for an hour each day between 1700 & 1800 NY time. Equities close at 1600, then there is an hour of something, stuff I am sure I do not want to be a part of. Those times are convenient for me as I am an hour behind NY. That allows me to catch at least the first part of the Asia session if I so choose. I decided to give it one more hour of paper trading. It worked about how I expected. Through the months I have found that to trade during this session is only realistically done with the MNQ (Nasdaq100). It has the magnitude of price movement over the MES (SP500) during this period.
Some useful info on these two indices. The Nasdaq100 has 101 companies listed and the SP500 has 503. This is according to
https://www.slickcharts.com/sp500
That was trivia. Both of these indexes are weighted. The weighting is what causes the magnitude difference. The interesting part is the two top companies, Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT). These two behemoths combined are primary movers of both these indexes. No, you cannot arbitrage this as the movements are instantaneous between the stocks and the indices (been there, blah, blah). Unless one or more of the stocks below these two has significant moves against the two mentioned it is AAPL and MSFT that move both the MES and MNQ and also their big brothers the ES and the NQ.
Mark ... Everything you have been told is a LIE