How fast are options market makers?

Discussion in 'Options' started by muckbucket, May 27, 2010.

  1. zdreg

    zdreg

    in those situations you ignore b/s. you enter an order between the bid and ask and hope that u get filled.
     
    #41     Jul 12, 2011
  2. quatron

    quatron

    You don't need to fill all the table overnight, all you need to do is to make sure the regions of your tables are filled by the time underlying gets there. You will also want to choose nodes carefully and store only them in the table and then interpolate in realtime to reduce dimension.
     
    #42     Jul 12, 2011
  3. nitro

    nitro

    On a slow stock with few strikes? No problem.

    One trick is to do interpolation. Quantlib is quite good at this, e.g.

    http://quantlib.org/slides/dima-ql-intro-2.pdf
     
    #43     Jul 12, 2011
  4. I would be surprised if you can cancel before being filled on a negative margin by a *hardware* based competitor. All you need is some order blast through the top price level on the underlying .. another mm arbs you in the option(s), and you're screwed .. now hedging 1 tick off .. which is esp an issue on a low priced stock, where a 1 tick is everything.
     
    #44     Jul 12, 2011
  5. nitro

    nitro

    I generally agree. If you look through my posts, I understood as early as 2003 or 2004 what needed to be done. I know exactly how to do it today in hardware, if I had the money.

    For as long as I can remember, I have known that speed is of the essence in options MMing. The problem is, that all the fastest hardware and computers and table lookups are meaningless unless you have the fastest data coming into these systems to begin with. In order to do it correctly, you have to spend thousands of dollars a month to have access to direct feeds, usually collocated on a cross connect. Without this, no amount of optimization that you do after the data arrives on the NIC will do you any good. So why even bother.

    The whole thing has become quite expensive. I have resigned myself to the fact that mm'ing is for the big houses that can afford it. Market taking is the only viable trading venue for even well capitalized retail traders.
     
    #45     Jul 13, 2011
  6. Especially when all the op arbing is done BEFORE the planned blast through in the underlying by the same guy doing the arbing. First the illiquid leg, THEN the liquid leg. Always, always, always. Impossible to counterattack.:eek: :p :(

    Hence the need for slow folks like me to always be convex, if at all.
     
    #46     Jul 13, 2011