Like the others said on this thread, volume is nothing to get excited about, see chart below with daily volume and avg. daily volume around 10,5000 The margins change almost daily since the calculation on the BTC futures are a bit different and based on the closing price of the BTC. No day trading margin breaks. As of this morning you would need $128,000 for one BTC contract, controlling 5 bitcoins. Based on that logic, we would anticipate margins on the mini bitcoin to be approx. $2500.
How about fees? Could this be a reason to get involved? From what I have been reading, its about $15 to trade BTC, but I'm not sure how the size of your trade affects this. ETH is apparently even higher. But if the fees are more in line with trading the micro ES or micro NQ, then I can see how this could be very attractive. Since there are no coins exchanging hands and its cash settled, there seems to be no reason to interact with the blockchain network, so CME should hopefully keep these fees in line with the other micro or mini products.
Sounds about right and perfectly logical. Except there was no logic in the CME specifying 5 BTC per future in the first place. Stupid-asses.
As an aside, notice how CME is classifying this as an e-micro. Which makes sense given the ratio between this thing compared to the full. If they want to get more traffic, they should introduce a true e-mini, representing just 1 BTC per contract. This way the micro would be in-line with all the others, 1/10th the size.
Out of my league here, but it must be difficult for players to deal with btc significant price movements outside of CME trading hours since btc spot trades 24/7/365?
@AMP_Global are you guys going to have this new BTC micro contract available for your US customers? #btccarrytrade
Oh...I see someone blowing up because of failed margin management XD By the way...the CME sized their contract when the underlying was about 5k so 5BTC per contract was totaly viable. Now they learned from their mistakes...otherwise you guys would complain about margins again when BTC trades at 500k after the next halving
I too found the value of '5' a little counter-intuitive. Oh well, guess it will have to stick for now. BTW, I was present at IBKR's Webcast today with the CME-GROUP. You could have asked them live some of your questions The funniest thing, by the end of their presentation, we still didn't even know what the TICKER was!