Victims of the EUR/CHF

16 comments / March 20, 2015

The shock of the EUR/CHF move two months ago is a classic. Something you can tell your grandchildren about. Happened the day before the January expiration day – a small reminder to buy back those small short puts.

Today in Der Spiegel a story about a 26 year old engineer. The guy has a nette girlfriend, a well paying job at a medium sized electrical engineering company. Everything fine. Michael Lewis could probably draw a nice profile of a decent regular guy. Only problem is he ~~gambled~~ invested 2800 euro with the CFD shop IG Markets.

DeGiro aims for Banco de Madrid

20 comments / March 18, 2015

DeGiro is hard to ignore. Every other day in the news in their conquest of new markets and connecting to exchanges.

Latest news is they aim for a takeover of a part of Banco de Madrid. The Spanish bank is in trouble after a bank run and the brokerage part, Interdin, is owned by the bank. Watchdog CNMW is guarding the unit. Clients can’t open new positions. Thing is DeGiro isn’t aiming for a full acquisition.

DeGiro won’t pay one peseta for Interdin. Offices, employees, brand name : not interested at all. The company logo reminds me of some US financial institution. Only the clients are welcome at DeGiro’s systems. After all they need to move somewhere. Interdin will be closing shop. Read more

FOW event coming up

5 comments / March 8, 2015

The annual Futures and Options World (FOW for friends) event in Amsterdam is coming up shortly. Thursday the 17th of March the conference will be held in the Hilton hotel at the Apollolaan in Amsterdam.

Was especially looking forward to the first panel discussion of the day. Paul Beck (Eurex), Adam Rose (Euronext), Willem Meijer (TOM) and Jasper Anderluh (DeGiro) could be very interesting. After all, Euronext and DeGiro are teaming up against TOM – while Eurex may be the most powerful outsider on the Dutch options market. Never a dull moment.

DeGiro censored, pull presence

Alas, while they’re still on the program flyer at the moment, DeGiro decided to pull their presence. DeGiro was told not to repeat their earlier allegations towards TOM Smart Order Router (SOR).

If you’re not free to talk, you shouldn’t be joining a discussion. A conspiracy theory could link the sponsors of the event to the content of the panel discussion : but no, this does not seem to be the case here.

Euronext launches options on Grandvison

2 comments / March 6, 2015

That’s pretty fast. Euronext is launching options on Grandvision, the optical retail chain. Stock itself will probably qualify for inclusion in the AEX index next year – depending on how many shares owner HAL Investments will sell in the market in the coming months. After all, they still won 76.7% of the firm.

IPO of Grandvision was exactly one month ago, on February 6th. In a week the options will be introduced, on March 16th. It will be a part of the “spotlight” segment – a kind of fast track for introduction of the options and a with limited lifetime cycle of 1, 2 and 3 months.

Euronext remains very happy with Tjerk Westerterp’s “spaghetti strategy”. Throw all sorts of stuff at the market, and see what sticks around. Saves a lot in the marketing budget. Though this GVN options could be a succes. We’ll see.

Trading recipe from HFT kitchen

10 comments / March 1, 2015

High frequency trading is like god. Everyone talks about it, but nobody has ever seen it. Nobody knows how it looks like, although mythical powers are expected. Strong opinions are in general not correlated with knowledge on the matter. But at least high frequency trading exists, that’s for sure.

How high frequency trading strategies work in reality is a rare discussion. Ran into a fresh website explaining in detail how strategies work in identifying low alpha orders in the market. How to make money with a strategy. Distinguishing humans from robots etc. Of course real valuable secrets from the HFT kitchen won’t be shared, and it’s a simplified post. Not always an easy read, but good to get an idea. If it’s your thing, there are a few more posts to find : mechanicalmarkets.

Following is a guest post from Mechanical Markets. The author has been a cook in the HFT kitchen, so knows what he’s talking about.

Amsterdamtrader