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Same reason US Treasuries haven't sold off. It isn't a massive capital re-allocation into equities. Guarded optimism with a hedge.

It makes the Bank of China further beholden to the USA, with no realistic way out of the conundrum until their own domestic demand can make up the difference.

I trade CL and NG butterflys and condors all the time using exchange-supported spreads. Buy Nov-Dec and Sell Dec-Jan and you are long the 'fly. Buy Nov-Dec and buy Jan-Feb and you are long a condor. Love those things. Do it with Eurodollars and Euribor too. Spread City.

I know three of the principals personally (floor trading days), and one of my clients traded there for three years. It's the prototypical Chicago futures prop business model. Nothing revolutionary in terms of what the traders do or how they are trained from what I can tell, but a solid firm...

The Spec Initial Margin Requirement listed by CME for the ES as of 09/17 is $5625. Honestly, no FCM is going to take on that kind of risk and go through the effort of setting up an account and execution platform settings for such a miniscule 'haircut' upside - even with 'daytrading' risk...

Yes, November has more considerably more volume than October - but with V0 trading 75K on Friday the roll is plenty active and in some ways a better trade.

In my personal opinion, books are more useful to an experienced trader than a Noob for a few practical reasons: A Noob would have to be able to sift through all of that information from all of those authors and sources, have a filtering mechanism to determine what is useful and what is not, and...

Exchange supported futures spreads. They are executed as one price and are internally matched by the exchange's order matching engine. Once executed, your platform fill window and indeed your statement will show two months and two leg prices. In my opinion exchange-supported implied spreads...

Great question. I used to day-trade them extensively for size from Spring 2009 and back because the trading ranges were so substantial. I still trade the CL spreads extensively, as do my clients, but we are typically swing-trading them for 2 or 3 day time horizons. The SPAN spread credit...

Bankroll is entirely dependent on the client - I have independent clients clearing IB with $20K and I have independent clients clearing NewEdge which requires a minimum $3M initial account balance. I have European prop clients clearing Schneider and I have Australian prop clients with Silk Road...

"Wouldn't flipping a coin for entry give you a 50% win rate?" Exactly. That's why this is a cute exercise for demonstrating a statistical expectation. But the total lack of variables outside the buy/sell-heads/tails comparison makes it a very poor trading proxy. Which of course is why the...

Boring couple of days in the markets. Regarding Andrew Hall's May drawdown of 10%; that's not particularly noteworthy in the world of private equity energy investment pools. When John Arnold started Centaurus he frankly had a much bumpier ride that Andrew Hall by all accounts. Hall has...

Oh, the exchange-supported calendar spreads are a few to several hundred contracts up typically. You can get alot done there. When I want to do flys or condors I am using the autospreader to do multiple spreads against each other. Great fun.

Well, clearly most of the traders weren't profitable and pulling their weight - but that is symptomatic of the prop desks throughout Chicago. Even DRW really pulled back on campus recruiting and consolidated office space. I can't think of one firm that didn't downsize to some extent - most...

I was with David for three, and with Ray for three. There are are few old-timers. My reasons for leaving one for the other were primarily access to very specialized markets and geographical location.

Well, I can only relate my own experience and guess at the others. Typically, everybody starts out at a 50% profit split. When you reach a certain profit milestone (typically $1M or its discretionary) you get bumped to 65 or 75% split if you keep some skin in the game. If they are giving you...

Well, of course the leverage is the big deal with the Chicago business model but the real gem is Member Rates. Pure and simple. They all own multiple exchange seats. You can basically trade Nymex for about a buck a round turn and Eurodollars for less than 50 cents a round turn. For me...

Gelber Group in Chicago let most of their prop traders go the past several months. Peak6/Breakwater, TMG, they've all downsized.

To post on Elite Trader, the member should show an active clearing account balance of at least $100K. I've gotten a few PMs of late asking if I'd start a traders website where there was paid membership and a bona fides threshold like an active trading account with capitalization...