Subscribe now and take my free trend following eCourse.
Free Historical Futures Price Data
The data encompasses most major contracts on US futures exchanges dating back to the 1970’s. All daily historical futures price data is in ASCII/text format easily imported into most spreadsheets or trading software products. Date, open, high, low, close, volume and open interest are columns. Making it ideal for use with your futures price formula calculating software package.
Click on each one of the commodity names to begin FREE futures price download (Files are in .zip format):
An Excerpt from The Complete Turtle Trader related to futures price formula and Data markets
Not many twenty-six-year-olds would have been mature enough to handle the press using such folksy wisdom. Yet Dennis never let the swirl around him interfere with what he was doing to make money. Quite simply, his trading technique was to trade seasonal spreads. In other words, he wanted to take advantage of seasonal patterns in markets like soybeans—his initial specialty. Dennis would hold “long” (bets to profit as the market increased) and “short” (bets to profit as the market decreased) positions in futures contracts simultaneously in the same or related futures markets.
Once he had his MidAm seat (formerly called the Chicago Open Board), Dennis was off and running. Initially he had no clue what he was doing, but he was a fast learner who learned to think like a casino operator: When I started out, I had a system called “having no idea whatsoever.” For four years, I was just taking edges. If someone was giving me a quarter cent edge to buy an Oat contract, I didn’t think he knew anything either. I just knew that I was getting a quarter cent edge, and at the end of the day, the edges would approximately equal my profit. Obviously, on an individual basis that doesn’t have to happen, but over a longer period of time, it will. I tried to be like the house in the casino. It wasn’t that novel. People at the Board of Trade had been doing it forever. But for the MidAm, it was kind of revolutionary because no one would understand that you could balance your risk with a lot of volume. That’s how I started.
Dennis went from zero to sixty on the MidAm in record time, and no one knew how he learned to do what he was doing. He knew that traders had a tendency to self-destruct. The battle with self was where he focused his energies: “I think it’s far more important to know what Freud thinks about death wishes than what Milton Friedman thinks about deficit spending.”19 Go down to Wall Street today after work with the hotshot traders all earning $500,000 a year at the big banks and you’ll find very few who talk about Freud being the ticket to making millions.
However, trading was harder than Dennis let on. The early ups and downs took a toll on him, but he learned the hard lessons within months. “You have to have mentally gone through the process of failure,” he said. “I had a day during which I made every mistake known to modern man. I took too big risks. I panicked and sold at the bottom of every break.
Trend Following™, TurtleTrader®, TurtleTrader.com® are trademarks/service marks of Trend Following. Other trademarks and service marks appearing on the Trend Following network of sites may be owned by Trend Following or by other parties including third parties not affiliated with Trend Following.
