Is anyone here an institutional trader?
{quote} not always, lehman lost
If only they'd stuck with that instead of getting their toes in those other gigs i.e. subprime and all that jazz...
{quote} LOL... was referring to the House's ability to make money from making markets, which is the most basic thing ANY Bank can do and STILL make money from. And I'm pretty sure LB performed their market making job just as ably as the others...
I see you are a bit of a market historian.
What is your view of LTCM?
Did you know that their models were right in the end?
They just didn't have the liquidity to hold on.
FXCM gets 12 billion per day, which represents 1/2 of 1/2 of one percent of the market, and this is meaningful volume. Did I get that right?
They did say it's a "non-negligible" portion of the retail market i.e. big enough relative to other retail guys but not the overall universal aggregate. And they're implying that this 12 bio is a not-to-be-sniffed-at sample size that's representative of overall market sentiment.
{quote} Spot market is just 1.5 trn, not the whole 5 trn which also includes swaps and forwards. So FXCM is then 0.8 percent. A very well done election day exit poll samples around 0.05 percent of the population (ie: 100,000 people in the 2004 US election for 1-2% error rate). Which makes the FXCM sample 20 times larger than a really good exit poll. Of course, that kind of compensates the fact that FXCM is not fully representative and randomized. And let's not forget that the Higgs boson was confirmed with around 200 observations in billions and...
http://i.imgur.com/bo7Nbgz.png
Missing my old dealing room already....
Thanks skenobi and jason for contributing here....I have a question about latency. I know you guys had probably zero latency when firing market orders because you were right there at your IT jobs, but now in the retail, it seems to me trying to get the best price when a stop entry order is triggered, with the least slippage, it's all about not just the latency time from me to my broker, but then, from my broker to their "liquidity provider". Of course, this is in addition to overcoming the spread. Do you have any tips on getting best execution times?...
Sorry am not much help. Maybe the others can chime in.
@ institutional traders Have you ever had to protect option barriers? How does it look like? Say, you have 500 mil USD option barrier to protect, does it mean bank will spend whatever amount of money up to 500 mil USD (paying spread, notional amount much bigger of course) to protect it?
), FX options is a bullshit market to trade in. I'd trade spot any ol' day of the fvckin' week.As an institutional trader, do you pay attention to Option expiries
eg. the strike price where most volume is at
or perhaps just generally avoid trading pairs on the day their options are expiring?
). Really helpful indeed.High/low areas are obvious choices, but some have more "history" than others and therefore likely to be stronger or more significant. Some old school price action guys (myself included) use line charts to give a better picture of this. We don't look at fractals, which are mostly extraneous spikes anyway.
There is no "X pips above/below" rule and it doesn't even have anything to do with the fact that each currency pair is a different animal. It depends on how all market players layer their orders within a zone. And by "orders", I don't just mean the usual stop and limit orders, but also institutional "standing orders". And btw, this is probably the only time looking at fractals might come in useful.
I won't expand on any of the above. A lot of it is based on "feel" which can only come with practice.
