How many people?

How many people (or institutions or whatever) trade the YM on a daily basis?


Just curious looking at the volume -- and in my first month of trading intraday ---- I traded 1 contract as many as 10 times a day


so curious how many active players there are in this game


(this is a serious question - feel free to bash if it is a dumb question)

 

I trade the ym alot during the day maybe 20x or so. I know a bunch of people who do as well.

 

Ahhh - you are a much bigger fish than me!

Thanks


I probably need to rephrase the question though ----
Since average daily volume is ~ 325K contracts and most people are trading a certain # of contracts repeatedly during a given day -----

how many total players are actually out there?

 

That I do not know but I am sure there are a lot. I have played the es and er2 but I do like the ym better then those 2. Sometimes I will play the es but manily ym.

 

I trade YM typically 25 - 50 times a day.
Sometimes NQ and much less often ES.
I will lean toward ES AH since the spreads on YM and NQ can be wide.

 

Avg is way to high, bro.

 

Closer to 150K?

 

this month skewed the avg, I would say between150-200k

 

Yup - the fist sample I looked at was the daily chart for jan
looking at it for 6 months its much closer to 150k

 

i'm not currently set up, but tradestation from what i recall offers a 'trades' field that shows the total number of transactions per day (additionally you can derive the same from getting a tick datafeed and doing a linecount). Then you can figure the average trader may make an arbitrary number of trades per day -- maybe 6-20. Then of course there are longer term hedgers who only make one trade per day, so they may not have as much of an impact.

You could probably guess the number of people actively trading it by the correct magnitude this way.

ie, from 7am to 5pm yesterday on the ZN (10 year bond) there were 17365 actual transactions at a volume of 1298904 contracts on exchange. Thats an average of 74 contracts per trade. Therefore the MAXIMUM number of intraday players on that contract yesterday was 17365/2 (open and closing trade), or 8682 people.

If the average trader was making 6 total trades [3 buy, 3 sell], then it is 2894 intraday traders at the most.

And of course, a certain percentage of activity is not intraday. But at most there are 8500 or so people in the world trading ZN intraday.. More likely 1500-3000.