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A comment on Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short. Parent comment

Re:Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short by option_greek on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @12:57PM (#15907779)
Usually there isn't any risk in this scenario but thanks to cboe rules that cap volatility at 20%, there is quite a bit of risk hidden here. Say, you buy btc and short the future. If btc drops by 30% in a day, future trading will be halted at 20% which means that you can lose money if it is an expiry day. Also, CBOE and your btc exchange aren't linked. So you will have to put up additional margin when btc goes up and your future is losing money.
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Re:Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short by meritt on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @01:02PM (#15907830)
Expiry day is going to be very interesting then. I had no idea their volatility rules would apply to expiring contracts too, that's insane. Why would anyone want to trade that instrument?
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Re:Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short by dresstotheleft on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @02:11PM (#15908474)
This is how all future contracts work. There are daily limits that lock the contracts from trading. Interestingly enough these contracts seem to have very high margin requirements and lock limits. I also find the discussion about "shorting" to be interesting. All futures contracts have 2 position - a long and a short. The number of "shorts" is identical to the number of longs, unless I am misinterpreting the was these contracts are set up.
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Re:Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short by option_greek on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @02:04PM (#15908411)
I wish I know :). Its not really a derivative if volatility is capped while the underlying is free to move around.
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Re:Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short by snowAbstraction on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @03:08PM (#15908982)
Just some kind of capped option.
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Re:Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short by where_do_i_live on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @03:01PM (#15908932)
trading is halted for _minutes_ 2min then 5min... hardly an earth shattering pause.
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