This question hit me today as I was driving down a long lonely highway. What is the max number of qqq contracts that can be traded and still expect to get a quick or instant fill. Probably not something I'll ever need to worry about, but I'd be interested in hearing some expert opinion. Rennick
Maybe I should be asking how many contracts do the big guys trade with directional plays, comfortably.
You can trade thousands of cars in the QQQQ options with no issue at all. for example, looking at my system live I can see close to 8,000 contracts up with about a 2 or 3 cent wide market front month 53 line. Generally when when big firms trade this stuff, not from the market making side or off floor guys who stream in their markets, they can work an order vs. the underlying or send the order to a desk whom they have deals with. Those big orders also tend to get shopped around so that their order flow deals stay in tact. The QQQQ options are particularly liquid so its easy to trade size vs the screens. In some of the other stuff such as individual stocks which are pretty liquid but not quite the mass liquidity that the QQQQ options have you get a lot more institutional brokers working order flow and crossing them.