Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I was just reading some posts by Sierrachart support concerning Rithmic and I came across a sentence that makes me believe that soon small exchanges will be tradable through Sierra. Look at the picture below.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals, U308 and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,059 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,410
Thanks Received: 10,226
I thought it was a good presentation. Michael Gough did an excellent job. He was extremely clear and spoke at a very even pace. The presentation covered all the relevant topics in a succinct way. I really like the way they have sized their contracts, all with $1 ticks.
I know a lot of people like the fact that the S10Y/10 Year Treasury is priced in Yield rather than Bond prices. I myself do, especially after having started trading Eurodollars last year (which are also priced in Yield not Bond prices, but the price is 100 minus the Yield so 99 represents 1%). The problem is bond prices do not move linearly with a change in interest rates. So if you are a big trading desk you are more interested in a product that hedges the non-linear bond price, than you are one that hedges a linear yield price. This brings me back to my question of who is going to use these products. The answer seems to be very small traders. While they may be excellent products for those very small traders, the question then becomes will there be enough small traders to get these products to the critical mass needed? Obviously a product like MES (S&P500 Micro) has been amazingly successful. But it's a derivative of another highly liquid product. There's an endless list of companies willing to make markets in MES 1 tick wider than ES. If the exchange is paying designated market makers a rebate, then those market makers are probably making the market the same as ES just to earn the rebate. Unfortunately there is no comparison for these Small Exchange Products. What are you arbing a precious metals contract that is approximately 80% gold against? If you arb it versus GC or MGC, that 20% basis risk that isn't gold will easily kill the 1 tick profit you hope to make. Hence as impressed as I was with the presentation, and with the contract size design, I unfortunately remain skeptical.
I spoke to Trading Technologies yesterday. They currently have no plans to add Small Exchange connectivity.
I have watched the webinar about the small exchange and there are several questions that come to my mind.
First of all I understand completely the premise and the reason for this exchange to exist. Also I can see the Tom Sosnoff's philosophy behind the small exchange idea.
I have watched their taste trades channel for years, because it's very fun. However his vision is quite different from the vision of a day trader and above all from the vision of a futures day trader.
Basically he thinks that people should always have a foot in the market and make small trades just to implement their ideas about the market. The trades he takes are mostly non directional (delta neutral), basically he thinks that markets are 100% efficient and you cannot predict the direction of the market (listen to his interview on Chat with Traders). So most of his trades are based around theta decay, in options.
In my opinion the philosophy behind this exchange looks like this: you are a small investor and you hear that FED reduced the interest rates, so you have a bullish vision on commodities in general. Then you want something to gain exposure to commodities without much risk, so you buy a couple of contracts of their product which is a mix of Gold/Platinum etc... and you are exposed with a risk of a couple of hundreds bucks.
But how does this work? who moves the price of these futures? I think the only reason for these futures to move, is because there will be some big brokers acting as market makers. So who are we competing against? Will there be run for stops, resistances, supports etc?? who is moving these markets?
Now let's put Tom Sosnoff's ideas about day trading into the picture, this is what he believes (check the inverview with Chat with traders here :
1) there is no way to beat the market and even quantitative models are bullshit (Tom's word in ChatWithTrader interview at minutes 22 to 25)
2) forget technical analysis.... markets are random (min. 25 to 27 of Chat with traders interview)
3) you can only make money through a statistical edge based on mean reversion of volatility. ( first part of the interview)
Basically if you believe Tom's vision of the market, you should definitely not trade in the small exchange.
However as futures traders, we believe we can "beat the market" by making directional bets and Tom offers us the chance to do so by market making, and taking the other side of any of our trades as a market maker.
Just to make it clear, this is not a critique to Tom Sosnoff that I really like, it is simply my perception of how this exchange fits into the overall picture.
I like his points very much. I don't completely agree with 3, but it's certainly one way. I'm just curious to hear @artemiso's and @SMCJB's thoughts on those bullets in particular, having not much to do especially with this thread... But because I love hearing from those two respected traders. I would ask @josh too but he's taking a break it seems.
I think, in fact, an entire thread just discussing those three bullets would be great, in order to hear from everyone else.
As someone that has followed them for daily entertainment and market engagement, the TT trading philosophy and his trading are on opposite ends. If you watch the show and pay attention to what he's doing he is constantly scalping. Its usually them talking between themselves saying to the other "oh just scalped NQ for a few". Also, the platform shows most of his trades and they are not all 45 DTE options.
Also, the small exchange is ran by a separate group with Pete (a futures guy).
Too much is being read into the TT method and the exchange.