I use(d) futures for most of my daily strategies because they could hold a position for weeks to save the overnight fees that CFDs would cause and there are often problems when a contract is coming closer to expiry. Often the new contract is not updated until the old contract is virtually expired making rolling over more or less impossible.
Also when a new contract starts trading it is often missing the last weeks of data so you can’t run any strategies on the new contract because all indicators are miscalculating because of that. I reported this issue many times and at one point PRT answered that they fixed it and that it should not happen again. Sadly this was not true and it continued happening. I reported it again and PRT then even stated that they thought the problem was fixed. Maybe it is by now, I don’t know.
Then this issue was always fixed by PRT unusually fast after I send a report.
I think the missing data problem is somehow caused by the way PRT handling the rollovers. PRT is somehow splicing together the data from all the front months to create in this way continuous data that can be used for backtesting. This is something IG does not do. Then it is probably up to IG to decide when they start updating a new contract. They seem to do so annoyingly late. I also would like the new contract start trading maybe a week before the old contract expires but my prayers haven’t been heard yet. 😉
If you trade on a real exchange you have the contracts of different maturities being all present all the time and not just the front month and maybe one more. When asking IG why they don’t show all the other contracts they replied this would take too much resources.
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