Quote from gdh:
When I asked Mr. Barker, Director of Interest Rate Products (Peter.Barker@cmegroup.com), about the 5x5 on the DOM he responded (and I'm paraphrasing here) he didn't seem to believe greater depth was very useful to traders and expressed a concern that the system could be overloaded causing data delays. (Don't quote that as it's just my one sentence take one his detailed multi-paragraph response.)
However, he also stated that the depth has been changed a number of times in the past "so if we hear that the trading public really prefers more depth, we can always go back the other way â its been done before."
Based on this, it sounds like they're open to the possibility of increasing the depth based upon feedback from the trading public. So you'll have to let them know if you want it changed.
My concern is with the combination of less DOM and reduced tick size we're now going to have only 25% of the price visibility we had before. I say this because with e-cbot on ZB we had 10/32nds on each side, now on Globex we have 5/32nds on each side, with the tick reduction and 5x5 we will have 5/64ths. I would think that when cutting the tick by half they should double the DOM visibility at the same time just to keep the same price value visible. Correct me if I'm wrong here. So to put it back to e-cbot levels they would need to show 20/64ths or 20x20 once the tick value is reduced.
I would suggest that if we want to see more depth we need to let folks like Mr. Barker aware and it might happen.
(Thank you again Mr. Barker for your prompt response. Hope you don't mind me sharing with other concerned traders.)
-gdh