Quote from thecalip:
What is this anyway?
http://www.cme.com/files/CMEMessagingPolicy.pdf
Basically the CME has this policy to prevent market manipulation. You know, entering an order above or below the market then cancel/replace making it appear as if supply or demand is at another level.
So the CME will fine you if you play that game. For certain contracts, like the ES, you can fool around with the order up to five times before it's executed. If you fooled around with the price more than five times before the order was executed during RTH, you'll be fined.
There's more to it than that. That was a very basic explanation.
The thread starter is worried that if IB is fined for his activity, yet others are "guilty" of the same activity, will each be fined $2000 or will each trader be fined $2000/traders?
There's lots of ways IB could implement a policy concerning this. But I doubt that this issue would ever come up. But if it did, IB could:
1. Curb your messaging to max alloowable per CME product before a fee.
2. Pass along the fine to the traders who "broke the bank" in a prorated manner. Meaning, the one who violates more, shares more of the fine.
3. Simply divide the fine up by the number of traders who violated the messaging quota.
4. Fine them all $2000 since each one on their own would incur the fine individually if they were themselves Class A firms.
Last one may seem unfair, but then again, the offenders, given that their message rate is counterbalanced against the sum total of messages of all traders in a given product, must have really gone ballistic with their message rate that it tipped the scale.
Ex. assume IB has 4000 traders playing in the ES. Then say average message rate before execution is 3.5. That's under the 5 message limit for this product. But lets say 3 traders do such volume that not only does it skew the message rate to 5.2 (which will incur a fine), but their(3 traders) individual message ratios are 250-500 each. On their own, each would be fined $2k. But since they trade through a Class A firm, the class A firm only gets fined $2000. The point of the penalty is to curb this type of trading. IB could split the fine up evenly among the 3. It could prorate the fine (ie. guy with most messages pays the most.). OR IB could charge them all $2k in an effort to uphold the spirit of CME's policy.