Posted on 10/15/2004 11:38:53 AM PDT by drangundsturm
Is it possible this guy's just got two accounts, then put in a bid to buy 10,000 at 10 the same time his other account put in a sell 10,000 at 10?
he'd only be out the commission paid (I think).
"will cost you $54.00 to get $100.00"
I understand as much, what I want to know is how many total contracts are outstanding times the dollar value of a contract to be able to see how much money it would take to manipulate prices.
George Soros could.
Since the inception, 40,000 Kerry contracts have been sold compared to 700,000 Bush contracts
But the two markets stay in near lock-step because of arbitragers. The iowa market is usually a few percent under the tradesports becuase they have different payoff parameters (IEM tracks who will get the majority of 2-party vote, this particular tradesports market pays off if bush wins the electoral vote, which is not quite the same as we all know;)
You can't conclude "clear market manipulation by some entity" without talking to the trader or market maker and knowing the background reason behind the sale.
For all anyone knows, he could have been raising some cash to place on football bets this weekend.
All these things are a buying opportunity.
Yes, it would. Good idea. I'll put in a big buy order in the 40s.
The only problem is that you need to keep an eye on it, and be ready to move quickly to cancel the order if there's a sudden campaign development, like a major gaffe.
But you can see how idiotic this trader was. Even if bush eventually loses, this trade was just plain stupid. If you really thought bush had a near 100% chance of losing, you would slowly accumulate your position over time to maximize your profit. You'd short 100 shares, then wait a while and do 100 more, etc., over a period of days. You would not dump 10k shares in 2 minutes.
Exactly....thats why i think it may have been a glich.....If it was a bonafide trade whoever did it probably went about it in the worst possible way like they wanted to lose money. Now there might have been dome small fish that got caught up in it and panic sold after seeing what was happening....they are SOL
I've read your posts on these futures markets before, and enjoyed them. Please ping me when you do so again..regards..
Maybe it's a bad tick?
BTW, in the commodity pits, "white raisin" and "Juniper berry" contracts have soared to record values..
Am I correct in saying if the trade was not a glich, someone burned up about 45K in the trade ?
While there could be other explanations I believe they are far-fetched. There are far easier ways to raise money than to make obviously bad trades. For example, he could have shorted a smaller number, waited for the market to recover, then shorted again. He would have raised a lot more money that way in almost the same period of time. This was just throwing money away. Some of his volume was actually BELOW 13! That's a ludicrous way to raise money. He could have shorted the market down to the 40's, waited 15 minutes for the bids to come back, then done the same thing again.
There are only 3 reasons I can think of to trade in this fashion: (1) trying to manipulate the market, and (2) he has some inside info that bush is definitely going to lose, and it is very, very time critical so he had no choice but to act in a single huge trade. (3) he is arbitraging some other market that is seriously out of whack. This could be a bookie offsetting a huge positive bet on bush perhaps?
If we don't hear some kind of devastating bush news in the next couple of hours it's either (2) or (3), or something hard to imagine.
Is that the one Rush was talking about today?
Makes sense to me!
Paging Hillary Clinton.........will the Jnr Senator from New York pick up the phone.
This is better than cattle futures....
I also got a timber company for sale....
are the political futures out of the Vegas sports shops around the same line? ... I always thought that sports odds making had to be the truest poll - actually reflecting the voters (bettors) preference ...
Has leveled off now at 55.2...what do you suppose those 10000 shares averaged on price?....he would have had to be selling all the way down
I'm not sure what you mean by a bad tick. I happened to be watching carefully at the time. Volume went from approximately 5000 to approximately 15,000 in the span of approximately 2 minutes. I saw the BID side shrink, shrink, shrink. In about 5 screen paints there were no bids left at all. 5 minutes later the bids started coming back up into the 40s then the 50s. The graph for "today" shows this spike. There has been no correction issued so far. I suppose it's possible that this is some kind of software glitch at tradesports, if so I would expect a correction to be posted soon.
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