ES trumps the others.

Nice, thanks. I wonder by how much. Here is why I ask:

a lot of technical analysis is done on psychological levels related to (in my opinion) SPY strike prices/SPX strike prices/SPX levels.

Yet, /ES is typically 20 points ahead of SPX. For example, there can be a battle zone of support/resistance at 4900 on SPX, but /ES blew past it a day ago. I wasn't sure if one had more power/prominence than the other.

The spread between SPX and ES is purely mechanical. It’s a function of expected future interest rates and dividends over the remaining life of the future.

There is no such thing as support/resistance in reality.

> There is no such thing as support/resistance in reality.

Where would you say 80% of the daily trade volume comes from on average?

The powers to be that I can think of:

institutional investors / fund managers slowly reallocating (selling stuff off, buying stuff) daily

high frequency trading algorithms trading shares back and forth to each other in an artificial way to generate synthetic volume/movement

market makers reacting to option chain volume to remain neutral

"hedge funds" / "quant funds" running their algorithm

what do those algorithms look for at the "minute by minute" scale if not things like support/resistance/patterns/volume?

In my experience a large % of the daily trade volume comes from me.

it's usually front month ES, depending on volume. And MES for smaller accounts.

I'd love to talk to you more. I tried to make a Mastodon account to reach you. I just have questions about how you might know this/what else I could learn from you. I don't trade or anything like that, just interested in learning if you'd like to chat more.

I don't trade, either. I just code custom data collection, quantity allocation, future roll and automated execution algorithms for certified trading advisors.