I'm not too happy about the contract...easy money will most probably be gone in a couple of months. However, I hope CME sets the standart for fees On the other hand: CME doesn't trade over the weekends. So it's 5 days for the institutionals and 2 days for the plebs to play Won't trade the future though. Cash markets and OTC futures are way too good to let go.
I like the way how cryto is being traded 24/7. Therefore, no gaps. I wish CME will adopt this when they introduce bitcoin futures later.
I've never jumped into a nascent market like this before. I would imagine historical data sets with sufficient depth aren't available yet to run stat driven strategies. Is some form of selective liquidity provision the most sensible way to enter a market at this stage?
There are no historical datasets in message by message resolution, that's correct. In addition the infrastructure is so crappy that potential HFT players are angrily flipping tables. So at the moment, it's pure discretionary trading skill that makes the most money. The fact that you cannot run some math over a dataset you bought from Nanex, hire a bunch of FPGA programmers to set up your algo at the colocation site while you pay a fortune for a priority datafeed is what makes this market so great at the moment. It's an environment for cowboy traders and not a pay to play market for popped collar ivy league arugula and white wine douches. There are some bots out there but most of them are market makers quoting from another liquidity source 1for1 and even they get their balls kicked when an exchange has 20 second lags because of a spam quote attack or a hot market. I honestly don't give a flying fuck about crypto currencies, but the market is a free for all at the moment so the one with the most skill wins...not the guy with the deepest pockets and microwave towers...that is about to change when CME comes in. On the other hand, you cannot trade size. It's not worth it for the big boys and you'll even have trouble trading like 100k notional intraday depending on the exchange. BUT: even if you don't trade it, it's worth having a look at crypto's because there aren't those layers and layers of cross correlated algo quotes (Like ZN gets hammered->dollar spikes 20ticks->Bids in Hard Red Winter Wheat gets pulled). So you can learn a lot about how markets actually work when they aren't distorted by monopolist middlemen (HFT), artificial barriers of entry(regulation, exchange memberships) and schemes that only cater a few (payment for orderflow, ISO's).
Precisely. I learned to manually trade in 2008-2009. Vix futures. The only times when manual beats automated is 1) Enormous market manipulating size, 2) times of panic and correlation breakdown. It's not really possible to learn to manually trade correctly in today's futures markets. There are not enough learning opportunities and the signals are generally too small. It's possible to learn in cryptos (they panic several times a day) and translate that knowledge to futures. No TA, no goofy jargon, no trading through their horrible websites. Just build a decent market ladder with their free APIs, co-locate with AWS so at least your confirms don't get lost half the time and go at it. A decent GUI goes a long way when 90% of the people are just entering market orders.