cant sleep, wish i woulda bought a cocoa. that thing is not stopping wow. stochastichs are overbought on sep coffee and tha close is right at the top bollinger. Does that mean we pullback, no but do we have a chance for a decent pullback or retracement of this mve up. Absolutely, nice little .50 gap up on the open went down and filled the gap very quickly as well. still looking short on this guy
staying flat still like the short sidfe, i need a close over 142.00 in sep to even think about long. Market still overbought. 140 or so to short
getting ready to enter some copper spreads july/sep. Put a limit order for two meant to put four of them on, oh well. Does anybody else really dislike calling their trade desk?
Got lited out of my cocoa spreads today at 69. It was a good trade, but in retrospect probably should have constructed it in a nearby month. 45 days an eternity and adjusted for volatility, figured best to take profits. Interestingly though, 2*2 of my spread traded on ICE at 75 pts. So... did they arb me? Did the filling broker give the order to a local "buddy" who then arbed the order versus ICE while he was trying to get the print off? Makes me wonder if these trading desks scalp money by arbing customer flow. Any thoughts? At this point I have no edge in cocoa. The technical breakout happened and would've been nicer to be long outright futures. Cest la vie for a spreader like me. RTRADER, you have a ton of spread positions and different markets to follow. Do you trade a very large acct? Interesting for me because I can gauge how diversified you can get versus x acct size. I frequently overtrade. Flat now and will see what else one can trade in here. What's this copper trade? You getting ideas from your broker coverage or constructing it yourself?
On another note MF global stock got killed. That 1bln + bank line coming due in December got people spooked and a 150mm convert deal ain't gonna do much to patch up that refinancing gap. Revenues looked crimped too but what I don't understand is that they cite tighter interest rate margins. I.e. - they operating like a bank /funding operation with custy deposits? I broker with them and hope they will be fine.
Riv I have a feeling that you have forgot more about options than I'll ever learn! ha ha. So let me get this straight. The spread eas trading at 75 and your fill was 68 (or whatever) Meaning you lost on about 70 or 80 bucks per spread? If I'm wrong at any point le tme know. Then you called the broker and he placed and you think he waited to place or called a buddy on the floor so they could arb it? Honestly man, I fucking despise those weasels at the trading desk, they are pompous fucking jerks. anywho I digress. Yeah man I can see somebody doing that easily. do that 100 times a day and you've got a nice little profit. And most people would never even know. I don't have a "broker" per se I trade with PFG (literally the worst charting system I've ever seen) and I just call in orders to the desk boys. But I notice that when I place an order for a spread (I watch real time data of the order book) and I see that sometimes my spreads aren't posted instantly. I don't know if something devious is going on or just plain fucking laziness by the desk schleps. Anyways yeah I trade alot of markets, I love to read and research. so I have no problem doing that all day. The only thing I've never traded is FOREX. But I will trade currencies time to time. I have a decent account size, I had an awful march/april and wiped out alot of capital. Overtrading has been a problem of mine def, but I try and work on it. Those copper spreads are only 135 dollar margin to put on. Check em out.
Yep, that's exactly what I'm insinuating. Methinks these broker desks which ultimately are subgroups within the futures brokerage, can dish out flow to whoever they want to use. If who they are using a proprietary market makers then in fact you are trading against their book and if they can arb your flow, so be it. I'm not sure if that really happens. Probably would be illegal- I think it's more like there is an unspoken camraderie with executing brokers and locals. Like Johny X at FCM knows a certain local in the corn pit and knows that when an order from x account comes in, he'll be his go to guy. I would LOVE to actually know how orders in option spreads are displayed to the "market" or to the pit to insure competitive pricing. As far as trading goes, I tried doing a blackbox automated rules based system using Qcharts, Button Trader and Interactive Brokers that was based on Demark Sequential countdowns. Bottom line, system connectivity and IB's glitchy interface didn't make it a reliable system and my rules based model didn't really pan out. Other than that I'm mostly an options guy in commodities. Cattle, Corn, Gold, Euro, Bonds. I trade mostly for the intellectual satisfaction and in excercising trade discipline. In my earlier times I blew up several accts at Alaron, Refco and Rosenthal trading way too big and undisciplined. Made massively big and wrong bets in Eurodollar spreads, got way too long in Gold into a blow off top, Got short the Euro on its way to parity with the USD back in the day etc. Interestingly, most "blow up" trades ranged in losses from 6-12k .
from MF's 10k. note section on Principal trading... When we execute a client order on an agency basis, we typically direct the order to an exchange or OTC market where it is matched with a corresponding order for execution. When we execute a client order on a matched-principal basis, we take the other side of the trade for our own account and relatively quickly (often within minutes and generally on the same trading day) enter into an offsetting trade with another party. We engage in matched-principal execution, which generally yields higher profit margins than agency execution, primarily in the OTC markets, but also in certain listed markets outside the United States. In general, except for corporate hedging and investment management transactions, we enter into transactions for our own account generally in response to or in anticipation of client demand, primarily to facilitate the execution of existing client orders or in the expectation that future client orders will become available to fill the other side of the transaction, and not primarily for directional purposes.