Can anyone list or point me to a list of who the active market makers are on the EURO futures at the CME? Also, is there any information available with regards to volume done by these market makers?
BN 04/07 Teller, Once a $100 Bln-a-Day Trader, Returns to Merc (Update4) Teller, Once a $100 Bln-a-Day Trader, Returns to Merc (Update4) Chicago, April 7 (Bloomberg) -- Marge Teller returned to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where as an independent trader she bought and sold as much as $100 billion of Eurodollar futures a day before quitting in July. Teller last month paid $400,000 for the right to stand among 600 traders and brokers to do business in Eurodollar futures, the most active contract at the Merc, exchange records show. Today she exercised that right, walking back in at 7:18 a.m. Chicago time, two minutes before the market opened. Investment banks such as Goldman, Sachs & Co. stand to benefit from Teller's return. She made trades in Eurodollar futures cheaper and easier by handling hundreds of contracts for such customers, compared with the 50 or 100 that rival market makers typically accept, traders said. Each Eurodollar contract, a gauge of three-month lending-rate expectations, is worth $1 million. Teller, who last year bought and sold contracts with her own money, is ``very competitive,'' said Curtis Krolak, head of the eight-man Kro Trading, which fills orders for customers by buying and selling from independent traders. ``She wants every trade, and that's good for us.'' Teller sometimes traded 100,000 contracts a day last year when daily average transactions were 802,000. She quit, at age 40, after price fluctuations caused by accounting scandals at companies such as WorldCom Inc. and changes in economists' forecasts for U.S. growth eroded her returns, she said in an interview last year. She also wanted to spend more time with her 6- year-old daughter. Teller declined comment on her decision to return to trading. `Much More Difficult' Because independent traders buy and sell contracts with their own money, for every 100 contracts they hold they stand to lose or gain $2,500 with each basis-point change in yield. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point. It's not known whether Teller is betting her own money this time around. She began her career in 1984 as a floor trader for O'Connor & Associates and was known for trading contracts for delivery in two to 10 years rather than the more widely traded contracts due in the coming year. Longer-dated contracts aren't traded as often, making it more difficult to buy or sell when needed. Traders use Eurodollar futures to guard against or bet on changes in interest rates. The price of the contracts may become more volatile as the U.S.-led war in Iraq continues. The conflict makes it ``much more difficult,'' said Sam Bailey, a pit broker who has traded with Teller. ``You could be dead right on the economic fundamentals and still lose money because something happens with the war.'' Wider Swings The average daily change in the group of four quarterly contracts due a year in the future has been 11.3 percentage points since the week the war began. In the four months before Teller left, the average was 8.1 percentage points. The group is known as the ``red pack'' because of the color in which it's displayed on electronic billboards that line the walls of the exchange. More than 95 percent of Eurodollar futures are traded face to face as investment banks and other customers wait for electronic- trading technology to improve before abandoning what is known as open outcry. Almost 18.3 million Eurodollar futures traded in March, up 1.6 percent from a year earlier, exchange figures showed. The face value of those contracts was $18.3 trillion. Last month, about 2.9 million futures for delivery in June 2003 were traded, compared with 231,097 for June 2005, according to Bloomberg calculations. Fewer Trades Fewer Eurodollar futures for delivery in far-out months are changing hands since Teller left, exchange figures show. Trading of Eurodollar futures for June eight years in the future totaled 2,109 contracts this year. In the same period last year, when Teller was trading, the total was 4,649. In response to a drop in transactions, which can mean higher costs for customers, the exchange in January expanded the pit where Teller stood to make room for 25 more traders. Investors will be watching to see whether Teller will trade the same way in the same contracts if she returns. ``The $64,000 question is: Does she go back to trading the way she was?'' said David Gough, an independent Eurodollar futures trader who did business alongside Teller. ``Or does she want to maintain her sanity?''
Maybe im missing something but i think pipscooper was talking about the euro fx future. This has nothing to do with the various eurodollar futures, which are interest rate products.
and I will contribute with the notion, it might be either. "EURO FUTURES", that would indicate fx as much as fixed income. Don't berate yourself", a bam bada bam a
i know trade link do a little, gs of course, and other companies like getco etc. a lot of these outfits you may never have heard of as they dont really need a public face. a lot of market making is done by automation now. remember that globex is auction driven, not quote driven like stock exchanges, so market making is more of a strategy than an integral part of the system imho.
CME has actually traders/market makers that work for CME in Forex. They are not independent like the lady in the Article. A friend of a friend is one of them (or was as of a year ago). His job is to help keep it tight against the cash. There was a handful of them. gotta go ---number coming ----so gotta cut it short contact the Merc
I worked for Margie for well over a year and my wife was with her for almost 3 years. Can women have balls? I think this one had them the size of grapefruits. Not a huge surprise she blew out again. Like the guy said in the article she would take on every order just so no one else got a piece of the action. P&l swings of 500k a day were fairly common. Ive seen her bank over 1 mil in a single day. The problem was when any of the spreads would get really whacked her would position would just destroy her. She was/is one crazy bitch. Jim
I agree with FredBloggs. Much of the "market-making" for the FX futures at both Eurex and CME are a default of different trading strategies by various prop groups. This is a result of the auction style of electronic markets. As for the CME, there is a trading group INSIDE the CME called GFX. It stands for Globex FX. It is chartered with providing 2-sided FX quotes. They used to report GFX in their 10-K reports, but stopped reporting (probably because it is a losing proposition and they want to hide it so it doesn't affect the stock price) It somehow seems to me to be a major conflict of interest to have the actual exchange trading against its customers in a very hidden and private manner. It raises questions like: Do they have better access to the matching engine? Do they somehow see order flow? What other special privileges are given to the exchanges own proprietary trading group?
Well they are hooked up with Reuters Direct Dealers etc. and their job is to make a two sided market and to keep it orderly. The one I know actually works for the CME (I don't know anything about GFX --they may have moved them to a division for some reason or another--probably before the IPO ---but I do know they were CME employees). As far as them trading against the traders. Well traders are always suspicious of things they do not know about. Funny, all these FX traders are always being traded against by market makers. The closest you can get would be an ECN like IB or Hotspot. And CME operates to facilitate buyers and sellers in an auction market on a FIFO basis. It is no FXCM but then again ---if something gets out of line ---the trader I know of can step in against the cash. They have all these rules they have to go by. Just like UBS and DB have rules they have to go by when they are providing a market at Hotspot and IB. In fact, CME should open up the MM operation to more outside groups. It would give more liquidity. Everything is on the up and up from what I have seen and am seeing. FWIW, I have been trading forex for years and traded at the CME. I don't see any problems with their forex deal. I have seen problems when it was floor based. But they run the electronic ship pretty tight and as others have noted here ---it is well arbed by outside traders. It hardly ever gets out of line for more than a second. Being a market maker in a forward rate against the cash (ie -futures) is not the easiest thing in the world these days. Everyone has realtime quotes in the Cash and everyone can see what they are doing at the CME. Watch them against the cash and see for yourself.
lol - 3 mins by the time stamp!! that is cutting it fine! have you ditched er in favor of ec then? i have (used to trade both actually, but now thinking of es over er2 due to the mad vol)