Futures trading order flow

Global Markets Stocks and Indexes
1

Hi guys!

I have experience trading forex and am now trying to get into futures, specifically commodities like oil. The last couple of days I have been researching a lot about data feeds and order flow. There are a couple of things that I still do not entirely understand.

Firstly, if I go for a data feed such as Rithmic for example, I get the order flow from the CME group, however ICE order flow is separate and is much more expensive. My question is, if I trade only with CME order flow, does this not mean that I am missing on a lot of order flow data from ICE, and thus not being able to see the whole depth of market on oil futures, for example? Now, I understand that CME has their own oil futures and ICE has their own ticker, but ultimately, aren’t their prices the same (with very small variations)?

So, the price of oil is determined by the whole volume traded on spot, futures, options markets - if I am trading CME’s CL oil futures and looking at the order flow to base my trades off of, doesn’t this mean that I can’t see a large chunk of the order flow of all the trades on all the oil markets?

Also, if all these different oil products are traded on these different exchanges, how is their price basically the same (slight variations)?

2

I’m quite new to the world of the Futures system too, so I might learn something from following this thread.
But I’ll begin with sharing my limited knowledge and experience.
The CL contract from CME is the world’s most liquid oil contract.
I’ve never investigated this but I would guess other oil contracts would correlate closely with each other. You could prove this to yourself by using TradingView and looking up each oil contract to visually compare them.
Due to the concept of diversification people wouldn’t ordinarily trade more than one correlated product.
So in conclusion I doubt if there would be any benefit in getting additional order flow data. After all you only really need the order flow data to begin to drill down and analyse your trade plan on a specific contract.

Like I said at the beginning, I’m going to be interested in learning from others through this thread.