I'm Trading an RJ O'Brien futures account, and so far have made a lot of money...

Con1991 said:
The main contracts I have been trading have been far out listings, Gold (Jun 24), Crude Oil (Jun 25), and WTI (Mar 22). I spotted opportunity with these contracts, as although they had wide bid ask spreads, they also had a last price far enough away to increase my buying power, while waiting for the price to move in my favour. Ignore the p/l today column, as that is in fact not one day's worth of profit, and actually several weeks worth.

Pic with profits attached...
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Wow incredible. You know you're rich now right? Well, let me tell you. I've been selling bridges my entire life and my top 3 clients (whose names I can't put here because of NDAs but think top 10 silicon valley tech firms) have spent several million on each of my high quality, gently used bridges.

Since you're a member of ET I will sell you up to THREE of my bridges for 30% off my list. 50 million for one, or 125 million for 3. Each is in a high quality locale guaranteed to make you a profit.

I'll give you until Friday to decide. I'm looking forward to doing business with you!
 
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Trading volume for the June 24 expiration on Friday For gold was 0 contracts. And daily volume in gold has been pretty good lately. there is not 500 contracts on the books to fill your market order, there’s not even 1 contract on the bid or offer side to enter any short or long position. Pull up a depth of market ladder for That expiration. There are ZERO bids and offers. You could post a bid and hope to get filled but that is extremely unlikely and something that’s impossible to model with a simulator. And then you still would have to get out... could take days and that’s with 1 lots.

Didn’t even know RJ o brien had a proprietary platform I doubt anyone who clears through them uses it, looks pretty weak sauce. There’s clearly huge glitches in the sim and it sounds like there’s not a depth of market ladder that a quick glance at would show you the impossibility of what you did. Use a better sim like trading technologies simulator and if you’re set on trading something very illiquid at least make sure it’s something that actually trades like say lumber futures. and maybe wait till you go live to share your success. And Simulators are bad at modeling relatively (not these markets they're completely illiquid so impossible to model) illiquid markets because even trading 1 lots can have an effect on the behavior of other market participants in a really thin market. But that’s not the issue with what you did, that’s just a pure glitch. If you wanna go long 500 lots in that contract someone has to go short 500 lots (or sell their longs but no ones long 500 lots for that expiration, look at the open interest it’s only 2!) who will that be? And if you could match with a seller they get to choose any price they want (ie they’d fuck you) since you used a market order. So if you somehow could do this (you can’t) you’d actually lose massive amounts of money. I don’t think you really get the basics of how a futures market works. And last traded price has nothing to do with open or unrealized P/L, your open P/L should be calculated based off of how much you would make or lose if you exited your position immediately, taking liquidity. if gold is 1900/1900.10 bid and offer and I submit a market buy order and get filled at the offer my open p/l would show "-10 dollars”. in the example you gave if you sent a market buy order you would get filled at the offer (ask) of 2095.4 and your open p/l should have been -934.00 (this is why you should care about wide spreads) for 1 contract and same if you went short with a sell market order. Since there are no actual bids or offers in that market my guess is it glitched out and used last traded price to calculate your p/l which really makes zero sense especially since your order would have technically been the last traded price. the way you use the term “market orders” makes me think you think they’re something they’re not.

one more thing there’s no way that there was “a crossed market” in a cme product that’s insanity and another glitch. That would be free money for whoever sees it. That’s like if there’s two people in a room and one person says “I wanna buy a cookie for 99 cents” and the other person has one cookie to sell and says “I got a cookie but I’ll only sell it for 96 cents”. It’s ridiculous and would never happen. Try to post a bid above the best ask (offer) you can’t, you’ll get filled immediately. It’s a possibility with products that don’t have one centralized exchange like CME products do but they’re uncommon and get arbed out quickly.
 
There have been a few of these "I made a billion (millions)" threads started by newbs and they are eventually caught out and several pages into the thread they show a SIM account that is just whacked. One of these guys was supposedly trading Ten Year Note calendar spreads - eventually I told him that even if he did 100% of the volume in those spreads, and captured the entire trading range, he wasn't going to make anything remotely close to the insane profit number on those dates he showed in his thread. And like this, it's some truncated and ridiculous phone app screenshot of a SIM account.

eternaldelight said:
Trading volume for the June 24 expiration on Friday For gold was 0 contracts. And daily volume in gold has been pretty good lately. there is not 500 contracts on the books to fill your market order, there’s not even 1 contract on the bid or offer side to enter any short or long position. Pull up a depth of market ladder for That expiration. There are ZERO bids and offers. You could post a bid and hope to get filled but that is extremely unlikely and something that’s impossible to model with a simulator. And then you still would have to get out... could take days and that’s with 1 lots.

Didn’t even know RJ o brien had a proprietary platform I doubt anyone who clears through them uses it, looks pretty weak sauce. There’s clearly huge glitches in the sim and it sounds like there’s not a depth of market ladder that a quick glance at would show you the impossibility of what you did. Use a better sim like trading technologies simulator and if you’re set on trading something very illiquid at least make sure it’s something that actually trades like say lumber futures. and maybe wait till you go live to share your success. And Simulators are bad at modeling relatively (not these markets they're completely illiquid so impossible to model) illiquid markets because even trading 1 lots can have an effect on the behavior of other market participants in a really thin market. But that’s not the issue with what you did, that’s just a pure glitch. If you wanna go long 500 lots in that contract someone has to go short 500 lots (or sell their longs but no ones long 500 lots for that expiration, look at the open interest it’s only 2!) who will that be? And if you could match with a seller they get to choose any price they want (ie they’d fuck you) since you used a market order. So if you somehow could do this (you can’t) you’d actually lose massive amounts of money. I don’t think you really get the basics of how a futures market works. And last traded price has nothing to do with open or unrealized P/L, your open P/L should be calculated based off of how much you would make or lose if you exited your position immediately, taking liquidity. if gold is 1900/1900.10 bid and offer and I submit a market buy order and get filled at the offer my open p/l would show "-10 dollars”. in the example you gave if you sent a market buy order you would get filled at the offer (ask) of 2095.4 and your open p/l should have been -934.00 (this is why you should care about wide spreads) for 1 contract and same if you went short with a sell market order. Since there are no actual bids or offers in that market my guess is it glitched out and used last traded price to calculate your p/l which really makes zero sense especially since your order would have technically been the last traded price. the way you use the term “market orders” makes me think you think they’re something they’re not.

one more thing there’s no way that there was “a crossed market” in a cme product that’s insanity and another glitch. That would be free money for whoever sees it. That’s like if there’s two people in a room and one person says “I wanna buy a cookie for 99 cents” and the other person has one cookie to sell and says “I got a cookie but I’ll only sell it for 96 cents”. It’s ridiculous and would never happen. Try to post a bid above the best ask (offer) you can’t, you’ll get filled immediately. It’s a possibility with products that don’t have one centralized exchange like CME products do but they’re uncommon and get arbed out quickly.
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eternaldelight said:
Trading volume for the June 24 expiration on Friday For gold was 0 contracts. And daily volume in gold has been pretty good lately. there is not 500 contracts on the books to fill your market order, there’s not even 1 contract on the bid or offer side to enter any short or long position. Pull up a depth of market ladder for That expiration. There are ZERO bids and offers. You could post a bid and hope to get filled but that is extremely unlikely and something that’s impossible to model with a simulator. And then you still would have to get out... could take days and that’s with 1 lots.

Didn’t even know RJ o brien had a proprietary platform I doubt anyone who clears through them uses it, looks pretty weak sauce. There’s clearly huge glitches in the sim and it sounds like there’s not a depth of market ladder that a quick glance at would show you the impossibility of what you did. Use a better sim like trading technologies simulator and if you’re set on trading something very illiquid at least make sure it’s something that actually trades like say lumber futures. and maybe wait till you go live to share your success. And Simulators are bad at modeling relatively (not these markets they're completely illiquid so impossible to model) illiquid markets because even trading 1 lots can have an effect on the behavior of other market participants in a really thin market. But that’s not the issue with what you did, that’s just a pure glitch. If you wanna go long 500 lots in that contract someone has to go short 500 lots (or sell their longs but no ones long 500 lots for that expiration, look at the open interest it’s only 2!) who will that be? And if you could match with a seller they get to choose any price they want (ie they’d fuck you) since you used a market order. So if you somehow could do this (you can’t) you’d actually lose massive amounts of money. I don’t think you really get the basics of how a futures market works. And last traded price has nothing to do with open or unrealized P/L, your open P/L should be calculated based off of how much you would make or lose if you exited your position immediately, taking liquidity. if gold is 1900/1900.10 bid and offer and I submit a market buy order and get filled at the offer my open p/l would show "-10 dollars”. in the example you gave if you sent a market buy order you would get filled at the offer (ask) of 2095.4 and your open p/l should have been -934.00 (this is why you should care about wide spreads) for 1 contract and same if you went short with a sell market order. Since there are no actual bids or offers in that market my guess is it glitched out and used last traded price to calculate your p/l which really makes zero sense especially since your order would have technically been the last traded price. the way you use the term “market orders” makes me think you think they’re something they’re not.

one more thing there’s no way that there was “a crossed market” in a cme product that’s insanity and another glitch. That would be free money for whoever sees it. That’s like if there’s two people in a room and one person says “I wanna buy a cookie for 99 cents” and the other person has one cookie to sell and says “I got a cookie but I’ll only sell it for 96 cents”. It’s ridiculous and would never happen. Try to post a bid above the best ask (offer) you can’t, you’ll get filled immediately. It’s a possibility with products that don’t have one centralized exchange like CME products do but they’re uncommon and get arbed out quickly.
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As I said before, I'm not an expert of Illiquid futures by any means. Neither do I claim to be an expert on futures in general. But, I have used a few demo/sim accounts in the past, and some have been more realistic than others. Obviously, a sim account can never give entirely accurate results, such that you would see in a live environment. I found Ironbeam to be particularly unrealistic with it's results, and I found Gain Gapital to be on the whole, quite realistic. Since RJ O Brien are one of the largest and longest running brokerages in the world, I would assume they are reputable, and not deliberately skewing the figures in a demo account. The platform I'm using is Mobile. You mention glitches several times in your post, yes I have encountered many of them. But what I see in the RJ O demo is mostly fills that people say may not occur in a live account, not numbers that don't match up with live data, like on other demo accounts. I can take the shock horror reactions on this thread/site (like trading is not a game of making money, but rather mocking and deriding before one has even begun yet) but the purpose of this whole topic, is to discuss and debate aspects of trading, including Illiquid trading. Many traders here have given good insight, and even a few chuckles too.
 
bone said:
There have been a few of these "I made a billion (millions)" threads started by newbs and they are eventually caught out and several pages into the thread they show a SIM account that is just whacked. One of these guys was supposedly trading Ten Year Note calendar spreads - eventually I told him that even if he did 100% of the volume in those spreads, and captured the entire trading range, he wasn't going to make anything remotely close to the insane profit number on those dates he showed in his thread. And like this, it's some truncated and ridiculous phone app screenshot of a SIM account.
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From what I can gather on this site Bone, you're a fairly seasoned trader. In fact, spreads are one of my favorite trading insights, and I'm always interested in them. Any profit in trading is good, balancing wins and losses is the key. If a demo gives one skewed results, that is the fault of the brokerage, not the learning trader. I posted this, because even if someone can make one tenth of that(admittedly unrealistic figure), then there is hope for all traders.
 
TBH, submitting market orders for 500 and 1,000 lots in ridiculously thin markets is what we call in the business a “fat finger” - it’s a mistake of epic proportions. In fact, in 2002 a brand new trader for Deutsche Bank placed a market order for 2,000 in the Dax during off-hours and it was a several million dollar mistake.

Emptying an order book to the upside for a buy and emptying an order book to the downside for a sell (those are market orders) could never be profitable in a distant expiry.

In fact, if this was a “real money” account your broker would have placed risk limits on your ability to submit orders and none of this would have taken place to begin with.

I wish you good fortune !

Con1991 said:
I posted this, because even if someone can make one tenth of that(admittedly unrealistic figure), then there is hope for all traders.
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@bone GC with a June 2024 expiration date isn’t a thin market it’s completely empty. 0 volume traded, 2 lots open interest, no bids or offers at all when you pull up the dom for it. There is no book to be emptied. How would he get filled on a market order? There is no market. You’re right but it even makes less sense than that.
 
It’s possible for implied spread orders to get filled when there is a thin market and someone comes in with a firm outright order in June ‘24. But the Oct20-June 24 spread would be very thin as well. Like in the tens - certainly not the hundreds or thousands.

There is a common theme here - SIM programs can’t correctly calculate P&L for dated expiries.

99.999% of SIM users are trading the prompt month only, and it seems like that’s where the programming design went. This is just my hunch but I think it’s a good one. I mean, if you go to market and you blow through everything clear to the daily limit for Gold - you’re losing millions not making millions unless Oct 20 and all the other expiries are limit along with June 24 - and we know that was definitely not the case in reality.

eternaldelight said:
@bone GC with a June 2024 expiration date isn’t a thin market it’s completely empty. 0 volume traded, 2 lots open interest, no bids or offers at all when you pull up the dom for it. There is no book to be emptied. How would he get filled on a market order? There is no market. You’re right but it even makes less sense than that.
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