I currently trading 2/10 steepener or flattener using two ETFs: STPP and FLAT.
These ETFs are very illiquid, and I am thinking about switching to futures for the curve trades.

My broker, Interactive Brokers, offers a ticker TUT to trade the 2/10 curve with a face value of $300,000 per contract.
Now I need to find equivalent size of TUT compared to STPP/FLAT ETFs that I am familiar with.

I charted the past performance of TUT and found that it's only about 1/10 of the performance of STPP/FLAT for a same period.
For example, in the past 3 months, STPP moved -7% but TUT only moved -0.7% on the charts.

Does this mean that going long one TUT contract is about the same as going long $30,000 STPP?

Thanks.

Firstly, these should help:
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interes ... 016-09.pdf
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interes ... lator.html

You can thus compute the spread DV01 of each unit of TUT.  I am not sure where you can get this information for the ETFs, but I am sure they will tell you.  Then it's just making sure that you match the DV01s.  Ideally, your empirical calculation should produce something not too dissimilar.

Firstly, these should help:
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interes ... 016-09.pdf
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interes ... lator.html

You can thus compute the spread DV01 of each unit of TUT.  I am not sure where you can get this information for the ETFs, but I am sure they will tell you.  Then it's just making sure that you match the DV01s.  Ideally, your empirical calculation should produce something not too dissimilar.

Thanks.
I found that TUT's DV01 is about 1/10 of STPP/FLAT.
So I will be using 10 times of the size of STPP/FLAT to replace the exposures.