commodities!! very cool... i traded ag futures for a brief time back in the day
re the "markets feel different comment" they probably are!!
this is the concept of "regime change" or "market epochs" see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regime_shift
in other words the market acts under one set of rules for a time then abruptly transitions into another type of environment.
i have to explicitly build into my robots this idea that what has worked may not continue into the future and to be adaptive, but it aint ez for sure
so much machine learning these days also explicitly relies on things staying the same for long periods of time. in stats we call it stationarity, and we rarely find it in the markets!! ;-)
Commodities are great fun but not all commodities contracts were created equal. I am forever shouting at the TV journalists who don't make clear distinctions between LME style trading where there is an actual lump of metal and gold trading where there is ... well ... sort of nothing behind it.
I feel incredibly ignorant about algorithmic trading strategies, it is definitely something I need to learn about. Perhaps my view of trading is a little Jurassic... I suppose to me a strike at a mine would affect the price of the metal, but now it seems that the volume of trade resulting from the strike at the mine is the market mover, not the strike itself! There is probably no need to even be aware of the strike, just the consequences.
(I am supposed to be writing a talk at the moment and all I want to do is start researching more about this... steemit does tend to throw me of focus sometimes.)