Good Morning MarkBrown, Yes, cost is going up everywhere. There is nothing we can do about it. Options and stocks is good too
Good Morning Poopy, Do you have an answer in this thread for me with options trading systems? Thank you, https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/how-to-execute-algo-trading-systems-to-trade-options.382427/
I remember those days pretty well. I think I first started trading in 1997 right before the Asian Currency Crisis & I got lucky shorting the ES back then. I think the ES execution was pretty fast but some of the commodity contracts were a lot slower in execution like Soybean or Oil. The guy I learned from was an expert Soybean trader and he used to have a bootleg Reuters Satellite News feed. I don't think there were many commodity day traders back then due to the pit slippage. Then came Globex & Tradestation software which really made daytrading possible.
I did, up xxx% YTD. That of course included some very high risk trades but there has been some good opportunities to go big. Last week being one. The hard part is waiting for them and identifying them and then sizing according to the opportunity.
Can you elaborate more on the throttled data? Do you mean the Data big firms and HFTs get (or speed of it) over normal members?
The cost of doing business in futures is so extreme, I would guess only a small group of elite people can consistently beat the S&P on a risk adjusted basis for a long period of time (at least 10 years). Obviously, in a few years, just randomness will let plenty of people beat it, but after 10 years I'm guessing few have. I trade futures on the side for fun. I also have passive positions and end of day systems I trade that are formal. For the futures trading, I don't trade very big and I don't watch markets all day. When I want to trade a bit, I take some positions and aim to get $1500-$2000 a trade on my winners. I changed this from $500-$1000 a trade after I did some of the below calculations, although I am a mean reversion trader mostly and the edge/inefficiency I assume wanes once I am post $1000-$1500 in profit. My commissions were 30K in 2024, despite my low volume. If you take into account a bit better than buying at the ask and selling at the bid, you can add 100K verse always buying and selling at the mid point. I trade metals and grains mostly. For PL if the spread is 4 ticks, I assume I buy 1 tick under ask to get to the 100K for these calculations. Then, when stops hit it doesn't matter the broker you are the last one hit. So I lose 2 ticks verse what the bid when my stop is hit. This is around 30K. Then you have interest. Hard to calculate as I trade sporadically, but that's another 20K loss. So the cost of doing business was around 180K for me, so commissions were less than 20% of that, yet that's mostly what people talk about in terms of their expenses. So to breakeven for the year I need 180K in gains verse no commissions, buying/selling at mid price, and getting the "mid" sell price when a stop is hit. To beat the S&P 500 on a risk adjusted basis given this is nearly impossible. I assume the average notional was 500K and I profited somewhere around 25K this year doing this. I had some significant losses that were painful learning lessons for me (shorting silver and waiting for a fall when it was making new highs, buying the crash of PA too early and too heavy) but you can't remove these obviously, especially as a mean reversion trader, although I definitely improved from them and the loss should be smaller in future. The variance is significant in a year so my performance isn't very relevant and is luckily not the point. I don't know my futures trading gain precisely due to having passive investments and doing serious trading around end of day systems, but my guess is around 25K profit with the cost of doing business was 180K, leading to a committment of paying 30%+ of profits to do the trading from the start. Some rough numbers, but given this, amazing how many threads on this forum about how people can kill it trading futures. Definitely not going to happen in the long-run. Futures trading has also gotten significantly more difficult over the past 3-4 years. Try putting 2 contracts to buy or sell on like 2/3 of the metal and grain contracts in the middle of the trading day and watch the market react. Volume spikes also don't mean much anymore for mean reversion traders.
Im not sure what you mean. Why would anyone desire throttled data? I assume the inference in parts of this thread from the op is that some CME members or the big money players get fractionally faster data. This is no doubt a fact and the same applies as to why they can spoof , stack and pull orders to this day at willl, yet Nav Sarao nearly ended up doing 100 + years in a US prison for the same alleged behaviour. But to people complaining about futures in general, they are far from over, if you are getting beaten by the market you need to up your game or packup . I solely trade futures and make a very good living from it. How anyone can suggest trading 'altcoins' as being better is beyond me. That is so unregulated and scammy its laughable. While not being altcoins, just looking at the Tether ponzi that is to this day printing aircoins ($140bn to date ish) and pumping btc while facilitating huge amounts of money laundering is staggering.