CME Gaps: Don't Ignore Them... How often have you heard this term “CME gap” on Twitter, Reddit and other social media platforms. People usually refer to CME gaps during and after the weekends. “There is a CME gap at $9800”, “Bitcoin is about to make a huge gap on the CME chart”, “gap has been filled” and so on.
What is CME
CME stands for Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It is the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange. This futures platform allows one to trade variety of asset classes like: agricultural products, energy, stock indices, fiat currencies, interest rates, real estates, metals and even they have futures trading options for weather.
What is a GAP
To put it plainly; A gap is simply an area on a chart that has no trades. It is basically an empty space between the close and open price of an asset. You can see the current gap just filled down at 19k-20k last week.
CME Bitcoin futures gap: Bitcoin (BTC) is being traded 24/7 on majority of crypto exchanges, but not on CME. Bitcoin does not trade during weekends on CME and this causes gap on CME chart once the trading resumes on the platform. The CME gap on Bitcoin typically occurs when the price of Bitcoin moves after the CME futures market is closed. Once CME opens; the trade on CME resumes at the same price as other Bitcoin exchanges thus creating a gap on the CME chart.
Why do they fill?
Price gaps getting filled is not just a CME phenomenon and is not just a Bitcoin thing. It’s a common occurrence that can also be seen quite regularly within stock and traditional markets. In most cases the price tend to fill the gaps and due to this many technical analysts consider gaps when doing price analysis. But why do they fill?
In physics there is a famous saying: “Nature abhors a vacuum“. This idiom is used to express the idea that any unfilled, empty spaces are unnatural and goes against the laws of physics and nature. This is based on Aristotle’s observation. Nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void.
Could this possibly be the reason why the gaps are getting filled?
Well, there are several different theories regarding this but the fact is no one exactly knows why gaps fill.
Trading based on BTC gaps
Although CME accounts for a large portion of BTC traded volume, the price of Bitcoin does not necessarily gravitate towards CME gaps. There are so many other factors such as Volume, momentum, buy / sell pressure, technical structures, support / resistance and many more.Traders consider gaps as an interesting marker on a chart. But they don’t necessarily trade on as they are not always a reliable indicator. They have high hit rate and so using them on your technical analysis will help you position yourself on the right side of the trade. However taking a trade solely based on this one factor is a wrong move. Trading gaps seems like an easy strategy but the risks are high and in most cases you’ll be on the losing side. So do not risk your trade account with just this one strategy. Use proper risk management, set stop losses and be sure to trade safe.
Apart from this there are other types of gaps which traders use in their technical analysis like for example: Liquidity gap, Breakaway, Balanced price range, Fair Value gap and so on...
I have located all the 'Unfilled' CME BTC gaps in the chart...
