Futures Quotes vs Charts
Of the ones that do have futures a lot of the time it takes a lot of work and clicking around to check a few different commodities.
I was using charts to check the prices at MF Global
Here is the chart for cotton
http://www.mfglobalfutures.com/resources/getquotes.cfm?page=chart&sym=CTN09
I noticed I was having a problem reading too much into the charts,
I am basically making my decision based on the historical price, when it is low I start buying, when it goes up I sell, when it goes down I buy more.
It's pretty simple, but lately I have been thinking oh look it's making a head a shoulders pattern I should buy more, or I should sell now and buy back later because it is doing this pattern.
The major problem is that the patters never seem to work out for me, I think it is because I really don't know them that well, and I really don't follow them to see what kind of track record they have.
I just randomly pick some pattern I think I see and try it,
This is almost always a bad system to use.
So I now have found a couple sites that have quotes and they will let you save your own portfolio of commodities.
So what would take me 10 or 15 minutes before now takes less than a minute.
This is a real time saver, and just looking at the quotes also keeps me from trying to read something into some kind of chart pattern and changing my trading plan in the middle of a trade.
My favorite one is
http://quotes.ino.com/portfolio/
the give you the full name of the commodity, which is not that big of a deal, but it is kind of nice, especially when you are looking at some commodities that you don't trade very often.
They also give you the percentage move for the day, this is really nice too because sometimes I am looking at sugar at 9 cents and it moves up .25 cents and I think that is a small move.
Then I look at corn and it moved from 349 to 358 and I think, wow that was a huge move because it moved 9 points and sugar only moved a quarter of a point.
But when you look at the percentage move the anything that is less than a 1% move is pretty much just flat for the day, and not a big deal anything that is over a 1% move for the day may have been a significant move.
So it's very handy to just be able to scan down a list a percentage moves for the day and check all the commodities I am interested in lighting fast.
The other site that will let you enter a list of commodities is:
http://www2.barchart.com/cquotes.asp
they just give you the symbols so that's why I like the quotes at INO a little better.
