Sydney Futures Exchange

When I opened my account with Interactive Brokers I signed up to trade all electronically accessible US markets. But in fact one can trade many international markets too from the same account. I just added the Sydney Futures Exchange to my permissions as the data is free and I am curious about trading on it in case we end up moving back to Australia. IB charge $A5.00 per contract for trades (about $US4) which is good. The only stock index traded is the S&P/ASX 200 Index. The contract size is $A25*index. As the index is currently at 6213 the contract size is around $US128k which is bigger than the US mini contracts but smaller than the US full size stock index contracts. The minimum tick is one index point which is percentwise about the same as the NQ and ES tick. I am tracking it now in real time and around 50-150 contracts are trading per minute at the open, so there is plenty of liquidity. Initial margin is $A6250 which is in line with the margin for a couple of ES contracts of similar value.

I don't try to day-trade the Aussie stock market because I think commissions are too high and the information flow isn't as good as in US markets (some of the info is better though). IB don't offer Aussie stocks yet. The Australian market trades in the US evening opening at 8pm EDT in the northern summer and 6pm EST in the northern winter. US markets open at 11:30pm or 1:30am Sydney time. Even though I tend towards being a nightowl it would be hard for me to daytrade the US market from Aus I think. As I get older I also am waking up earlier in the morning. Of course, all the Asian markets would be open to me from a base in Australia but language issues might pose a barrier. For example, Yahoo's Hong Kong site is in Chinese but the Singapore site is in English. Hong Kong is a bigger financial market.