How To Trade The S&P 500 Index Futures?

I found this interesting research about the hourly performance of the S&P 500 Index:

"The chart below shows the average hourly change of the S&P 500 since the April peak. In the early stages of the correction, the last hour of the day was strongest and indicated that investors were eager to buy on weakness. In the last two weeks, however, we have seen a complete reversal to the point where the last hour of the day has gone from the strongest to the weakest. Investors have gone from buying on weakness to selling at any price.

In terms of what this means for the market, there really aren’t any compelling statistics that say this is good or bad for the market going forward. In the present case, however, the period of last hour weakness coincided with when we broke below the lows from the flash crash. Since then it appears as though investors have lost a lot of trust in the market and aren’t willing to hold stocks overnight. So while most people thought that the flash crash would be an event that caused investors to lose confidence in the market, it wasn't until after the flash crash lows were broken to the downside (an event which actually validated the down move on the day of the flash crash) that investors really started to show it."

The most interesting regularity that I have spotted in this study is the opposite performance between 2-3 pm and 3-4 pm. How can we play this? If the S&P 500 goes down from 2-3 pm, you buy the last hour and if the S&P 500 Index goes up in the 2-3 pm time interval you short the S&P 500 Index. Of course this trade can be done through emini S&P Futures or through SPDR S&P 500 ETF (Public, NYSE:SPY) and through ProShares UltraShort S&P500 (ETF) (Public, NYSE:SDS) the inverse S&P 500 leveraged ETF for the short trades.

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