Is it possible to see/find the percent or number of retail contracts that actually trade on the futures market, i.e the emini s&P 500 or nasdaq. I'm betting it is a very small number of the total number of contracts? If not from the exchange, are there any broker filing reports where this information could be found? I'm just curious how many actual retailers are trading the futures. I'm betting it is a very, very minuscule amount of total volume.
Personally, I've never bought into the whole COT and delta footprint and volume analysis theme. Price is king. I get paid on price appreciation or price depreciation. My 2 cents.
I'm sure it's very difficult to answer that question. How would you define retail with respect to futures? Your definition will be different from the CFTC.
Typically people who look at this kind of problem look at small trades (just a few contracts) versus "block" trades (dozens or hundreds of contracts). Given CME no longer bundles trades that happened at the same time at the same price, the quality of such analysis must have improved. All you need for such analysis is tick trades data.
I sure hope so, if I find I'm just riding the coattails of a lot of retail traders... well.... I'm going to feel like I'm below average or something...
The reason I'm asking is I'm betting that very few traders are actually trading these products. I'm betting there are very few retail traders. I'd just like to get some stats. I might go trawling through IB or other firm press releases. This question was not for a trading edge but curiosity.
OK, here is some data. OK it is equities and it is in Australia. Because institutional traders often split large orders into small orders (in order to conceal the presence of a large order from the market), these researchers decided to classify order by the broker: some brokers are known to work only with institutional clients and other have mailny retail clients. Here is the data: http://www.mfa-2010.com/papers/Brown and Wee 2010.pdf If you search for papers referenced in the study or referencing the study you may find something to answer to your exact question.