trading mostly based on price ladder/ depth of market

[Jonathan Weissberg]

Not looking to pick a fight or anything as I know you are a big fan of spreading but i've been a prop trader in London for 15 years and its the other way around here. Everyone was just spreading firstly 5/10yr bonds and STIRS, then every prop firm was an energy spread trading firm. Literally hundred of guys all doing the same flys and cals. But the correlations all broken down now (compared to how they were). You could sit a chimp down and get them making money spreading a mean reverting range back and forth for years at a time, was good whilst it lasted.

But now there are only 2 or 3 major prop firms and the guys making money are all either event traders or DOM scalpers. But hey, thats whats so good/infuriating about trading. There is no one way to make it work.

Hey, NP. I agree completely that there's no singular way to make money trading markets.

The last guys I knew at DE Trading (Glenview/Chicago) who were making money scalping at my old firm had a tool for managing {gaming} order queue position.

Looking at DRW, Jump, Peak6, Geneva, Belvidere, TransMarket today - it's all automation and still quite a bit of spreading and lead-lag correlations.

I am not aware of any firm in Chicago where manual scalping a DOM has any sort of prevalence in terms of strategy.

I've noticed this too. I wonder why it's so much more common in Europe (and elsewhere) for people to sit in-front of futures DOMs than in the US? I am guessing it is simply the amount of market-impacting events occurring around a workable European timezone (which includes being able to work US hours)?

DOM traders in US are all in stocks seems like.

 

[Jonathan Weissberg]

People continually say "oh you can't trade using the DOM now because of all the games algos play". What you are missing is we make money BECAUSE of the games the algos play. If an algo comes in everyday and puts fake orders in the market I am going the opposite way to his fake orders.
If anything happens consistently in the markets you can make money off it. The only bad thing about algos is they tend to switch off once you have rinsed them of their money for a while and they go away and you need to find another one.

Hey tommo, good to have you posting in the thread. From what I've seen at prop shops, when people say that, they're usually referring to orders once getting worked idiotically or aggressively vs. a very big & slow order getting worked over a whole session in a mind-numbing grind.

 

[Scalping_Padawan]

DOM scalping is still a viable strategy, the game has changed quite a bit, and you will have to continue to recreate your own edge. The old DOM strategies are mostly dead--- entering in current strategies that fit today's markets. For any would be scalper, it is more than worth the effort. You also don't have to basically play a commission war game if you pick the right markets...