Hi All,
Since I’m “Out of Work” and I live in Australia and I like to keep myself busy, I thought that I’ll start a thread on the AUS200. I performed a search and I couldn’t find any threads on this instrument, so why not ?
In the Asian session this instrument is rather volatile straight from the open which is good for day trading. Liquidity appears to be good during the Sydney session, being a CFD it is a synthetic instrument of the underlying SPI futures contract or AP as it is known on the Sydney Futures Exchange.
Now this may get confusing as the AUS200 tracks the APY00, ( SFE SPI 200 INDEX CASH ) but is assigned a different point value on the various CFD brokers platforms.
I don’t know the actual logistics of why this is the case as I’m just interested in chart patterns so it doesn’t matter to me.
The Instrument trades between 9.50am-4.30pm Sydney time. Then 5.10pm-7.00am Sydney time for the overnight session. The market operates Mon-Fri.
The spread on the AUS200 is 1 point on my brokers platform for the day session and then opens up to 4 points in the afternoon session.
The afternoon session looks illiquid to me for most part of Euro session before getting a bit more volatile during Nyork and because of this and since I am more of a short term trader I prefer to exit all positions before the close of the day session. Swing traders may hold positions overnight but It is advised to lengthen your stops to account for the wider spread. A holding fee is also payable for those whom hold positions overnight. My broker charges -6.6 points swap long and -1.31 swap short with 3 day swap fees payable on Mondays.
As I have only recently got back in to trading after a small break I’ll be discussing the charts, analysis and positions on a demo MT4 platform. My analysis and thoughts about the instrument will be discussed in both real time and in hindsight depending on my availability.
Everyone is welcome to join in with your thoughts, however please keep the thread clean of sarcasm and slander. I’m here to help, learn and have fun with the markets firstly. If you trade and lose money on any ideas found in this thread I don’t accept responsibility the onus will be on the individual.
I will try and keep this thread active daily but there are days that I won’t be able to due to other duties or commitments I have.
Let’s begin:
I always begin my analysis with the highest time frame available on my charting platform. Below is the monthly chart of the AUS200. It is important to understand your instruments health before you begin to trade it. As you can see 2007 was the all time high for Australian equities. Price is slowly trying to get back there and has reached the .786 retracement level of that entire 2007-2008 high to low.
I like to use my version of Ichimoku for analysis and trading, here you can see price is currently above the cloud so the long term health of the instrument is positive and on the improve. Note the .786 retracement has created a road block for price. If price is able to close above this level at some time in the future the likely hood then is that price will be looking to re visit the all time highs of 2007.