Some Wall Street banks won't offer access to the first Bitcoin futures market | Hacker News Reader

Some Wall Street banks won't offer access to the first Bitcoin futures market

foxbusiness.com

109 pointstadasv35 comments

The only winning move is not to play.

Spend time investing in yourself and your skills, and put your money in something like VTSMX, Vanguard's extremely low-overhead total stock market index fund.

The stock market has been proven to be rigged!

The only winning move is not to play.

Put your money in an FDIC insured monkey-market or savings account with no attached fees and a decent interest rate.

Treasury i bonds aren't bad either- there is a 10k limit though

they barely keep up with inflation! (Arguably even fail to do that based on which consumer price index metric is used)

Only play with what you are willing to lose. If it’s a pyramid scheme you could make a gamble and get out in time. If it’s legit you’ll be fine.

If it’s a scam, whatever. You had fun. ;)

Bigger story: some CME brokers will offer access to their retail traders. NinjaTrader (US) and RBC (Canada) intend to.

The retail investor is the time to sell.

After they buy, who is there to sell to?

Pick your peak... do unload.

It's the first time I hear about "long-only futures", is this even legal?

EDIT: I know it’s legal for equity options, where retail traders need to be eligible to be able to write options.

They not "long-only" futures. One particular broker has decided they're going to let their customers have long positions in the future rather than short, that's all.

These are synthetics. Why offer both side of the coin if you only believe in one side.

If interested in Bitcoin have Bitcoin. If interested in synthetics buy this. Counterparty risk plus plus.

Since QC will in all probability break wallets would there be any reason not to short BTC over say a 10 year time frame?

If the price goes up by another factor of 10 before it crashes, you could end up in serious trouble.

Keynes: the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Considering at this point I expect a lot of short contracts it’ll be interesting.

If Goldman has already created the futures system and darkpools etc, they can make money off of it and they intend to.

Goldman is about to start selling CME Group’s bitcoin futures.

The genesis block is weeping right now

I think you are joking but I don't think this is out of line with the original vision. Wall Street still will not control the block chain, and there was never any intention of excluding anyone from its use.

AFAICT it'd not selling, but clearing - matching clients who wish to buy and sell, and takinga nice fee off the top.

Yes Goldman would be a clearing broker; by selling I meant more like offering these futures to their clients as a product, so selling was more in the retail meaning of selling a product/service than the financial one.

> As investors rush into bitcoin, some big Wall Street banks are hitting the brakes.

This metaphor sounds as if they're taking an affirmative step to halt the "rush." But they're just not opting-in to this new futures offering. If we need to stick with this metaphor, let's try "some big Wall Street banks are coasting."

yep. FUD.

This reminds me of the time that other industry being disrupted pressed pause on the disruptor.

Being disrupted!

Lol

This is worth paying attention to though, the CFTC has traditionally had a lackadaisical approach to approving financial products, where other agencies are typically risk averse and out in much more rigor

This has led to Congress itself banning futures products

There are two futures contracts explicitly banned in the US, and another could easily ride into the tax reform bill

I know about cornering the onion market and the Onion Futures Act, what is the other banned futures contract in the US?

Box office futures

(Speculating on how many movie tickets would sell for a new movie, would be a great way to hedge and speculate)

This was shut down by congress right before it started, last minute addition to the financial reform bill while simultaneously getting the all clear from cftc

The article alludes to this at the end but doesn't talk the real reason head on. As these are leveraged products the banks are exposed to large swings in the contract price via various clearing mechanisms. So they are looking at the volatility and asking what happens when someone doesn't pay and we have to step in and cover them. BTC is a bit of a volatile underlying. If I was in clearing risk I would be worried too.

It's a pretty big brake from the point of view of institutional investors. If none of my brokers offer access I simply can't trade it - it stops volume going through the futures.

Futures volume will drive volume in the underlying if only as Sneaky Sneaky People attempt to arbitrage using the hilariously manipulable price of bitcoin

Can you expand on that second paragraph?

> Can you expand on that second paragraph?

Futures stabilize the price of the underlying commodity.

The argument mostly boils down to that most rational actors will only tolerate a +/-N% change over the lifetime of a futures contracts

So the average future contract +/-N% (overall futures) roughly becomes the maximum volatility you can see out an asset over that duration. If it is exceeded people may stop trading futures, lowering the number of swaps, and by extensions trades of that asset. Providing a method to -let steam out- of a volatile system.

——

There are many examples against this (housing crisis 2008). The main example for is Chicago future exchange in the 70’s and 80’s http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FuturesandOptionsMarkets....

From the very link you posted, "Because futures contracts offer assurance of future prices and availability of goods, they provide stability in an unstable business environment."

I typo'd.

I was trying to show there was support for them providing stability, as for them failing to do this.

Futures trading allows better price discovery, and generally improves the market for the underlying by contributing liquidity, especially from speculators.

(This is true for most commodities, but I think it could potentially be false for BTC depending on the way hedging transactions are logged and computed.)

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