Recent content by reactor

In response to the OP, I'd work the order if it was large, otherwise I'd just give them a wide quote. This will prevent losses.

The truth is simple: the money is made from the comissions and not from taking outright risk. If I make 1 basis point from $1,000,000,000 of client flow each day and there are 260 trading days a year, I will make $26m. Given that I have a profit cushion, I am able to take a bet and risk...

They are phoning up a real broker "Mint" based in Cannon Street. Similar setup as ICAP but on a smaller scale. The money is real and as they have 25k each and can only risk 5k on a trade, they can't go too wrong. I'm sure they would have been taught strategies at Cass Business School. More...

Most traders call up when they want to deal in size, especially anything over $10m. The machine they put their trade tickets into was a time stamper. The back office people would then reconcile the deals done.

The strategies they use, risk management and tools. Bearing in mind they are a company that pays a salary, lets you trade their money and gives you a cut of the profits, I think a lot of people on the board would find the information useful from an ex trader there or even a current one.

50% payout is a nice number but I'm more interested as to how they are taught to trade. If it was just a matter of buy low and sell high, I'd just buy myself an option that gives me the right to do so! No doubt some of them would have been laid off recently and maybe able to provide some...

Hi, I'm curious to the strategy employed by First New York. Are there any ex-traders from the firm that have any insight?

I'd work on the sell side until you are confident that you can make money from being on the buy side.

It depends on the probability distribution you use. Black Scholes Merton relies on lognormal, but general statistics uses the normal. There will always be a difference. If you use the normal distribution, you are assuming that financial instruments in general have a very tight range, when...

Hi, Can anyone advise? Thanks!

Hi Def, I haven't opened an account yet with IB and the demo account does not have the functionality. If you can tell me the formula that is used to calculate it, I can work it out. Here are the numbers. Underlying FTSE 100: 6220. Strike of put 5925 Strike of call 6475...

Hi all, Just a quick question. What is the margin requirement on Interactive Brokers currently if I want to short a strangle on ESX? Thanks in advance!

LOL if I buy a share for 100 bucks, someone gets my 100 bucks and I get a share. If the share goes up to 200 bucks and I sell it at that price, I get 200 bucks and someone is now out of pocket for 200 bucks. That extra 100 bucks profit has come from outside into the market, but that money...