Normally Houston TX but in South Africa this month
Experience: Advanced
Platform: TT and Stellar
Broker: Primary Advantage Futures. Also Marex (old ED&F) and Tradestation
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Posts: 4,847 since Dec 2013
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I believe that is incorrect. I think you will find that the ICE Brent matching engine is at Equinix/Cermak in Chicago.
While this may seem illogical you need to think back to ICE's root's. They originally launched as an OTC Metals & Oil trading system but only became successful several month later when they also launched OTC US Power & Gas. When they bought the International Petroleum Exchange ("IPE" home of the Brent & Gasoil futures contracts) several years later, the IPE didnt have any electronic trading system, so I believe electronic trading of Brent was implemented on their current inferstructure in the US which also gave it the advantage of proximity to Globex. With their acquisition of LIFFE in London this could obviously change but I suspect that the proximity to Globex will keep it in Chicago. Saying that there is a rumor that they ("ICE") may be moving everything to New Jersey where the NYSE matching Engine's are. This is probably the scenario that makes them the most money.
Maybe @artemiso can confirm their location and comment on the NJ rumors. He seems to be the most knowledgeable on things like that here.
What type of trading are you doing?
If it's point and click colocation probably won't help you much. The prices/info still have to cross the atlantic for you to react/click on them.
If it's any form of automated strategy/autospreader etc then colo will probably make a huge difference, depending upon how latency dependent you are. (Autospreader - High, High/Med Frequencey Scalping - High, Low Frequency Scalping - Med, Automated EOD trading strategy - Low).
DMA is exactly that. It's direct market access. If your talking or checking with another system, going through another server it's not DMA. DMA is normally pretty expensive because you have to pay the exchange for a private data feed. In my experience this is upwards of $1000/month/exchange. As @sam028 said "CQG may have direct access but not you and your "retail" AMP/CQG account."
For what it's worth I looked at CQG several years ago, but passed. At the time everything went through their infrastructure. Hence even if you were colocated you were still waiting for messages/prices to go through their infrastructure before it got to you. I don't know if that's still the case - something I read recently implied it wasn't but I'm not a user so am not sure.
+1 all of this.
I would add that it's quite possible to get all three of these at the same place. Not familiar with CQG but I know with TT Risk and Credit functions are performed at the TT Gateway which is connected to the exchange feed. If the broker wants to change/check risk, they log onto the Gateway. Nothing has to be sent to them first.
Note that a common trick to reduce the latency of the credit and risk check is to send an off market order, and then change the order to the price you want when you need it. The initial order is credit/risk checked but the price change isnt. You probably need to be pretty advanced though to be taking advantage of that - I know I'm not.
The following 3 users say Thank You to SMCJB for this post:
Normally Houston TX but in South Africa this month
Experience: Advanced
Platform: TT and Stellar
Broker: Primary Advantage Futures. Also Marex (old ED&F) and Tradestation
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Posts: 4,847 since Dec 2013
Thanks: 4,172 given,
9,786
received
Endex? wow not a name you hear on these forums very often. I will double check but I believe the answer is yes. I believe the reality is Endex is just a brand name, these (NGX, Endex etc) are all at their core ICE exchanges
The following user says Thank You to SMCJB for this post:
none of this matters. ive never met a successful human trader who said..my edge is low latency
i never met a human loser trader who said..i lost because it took my orders 9 milliseconds instead of nano
i too went thru a latency phase of my trading years ago
i spent 6 monthe learning everything about microwave towers lasers eyc. olocatiob
guess what...none of it maters you cannot compete with the big black box outfits and you neer will be abke too again..
i read over a hundred research papers on sine waces and hft trading and electrical engineerig etc. none of it will help a mouse or keyboard trader. none of it
it is not latency it is gtc orders filling the book. imagine you have a billion on credit and you place hundreds if thousands of orders gtc to place hold onthe book?
then you just cancel them or any number of them and you are still 1st on the book always.. you have orders out months a head
Normally Houston TX but in South Africa this month
Experience: Advanced
Platform: TT and Stellar
Broker: Primary Advantage Futures. Also Marex (old ED&F) and Tradestation
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Posts: 4,847 since Dec 2013
Thanks: 4,172 given,
9,786
received
As I said previously, if it's point and click proximity probably won't help you much. The prices/info still have to travel to you inorder for you to react/click on them.
If it's any form of automated strategy/autospreader etc then proximately/latency will probably make a difference. My edge may not be latency, but bad latency definitely effects my performance.
I had an issue today where latency (sub 10ms not nano's) cost me. Still finished up on the day but I would have been up more if it wasn't for that.
Bingo. Agreed. If your clicking your probably much better of focusing on something other than latency. If your automated maybe not.
Queue position is important for a lot of people, especially HF. This is a lot less of problem in markets that really move like energy and the Nasdaq. It's a huge issue for a small trader though in slower markets, especially the ones that don't have LIFO order matching (thinking of you interest rate products!).
While that is true, if not sure that the refill on an iceberg maintains the same queue priority of the first slice. If I put in a GTC iceberg for 5 lots, 1 by 1 by 1 etc then somebody puts in a 10 lot order behind me. My understanding is that my first 1 lot obviously has queue priority but my second 1 lot would be behind the 10 lot order since the timestamp on my order is the refresh of the order and not the original order. On this discussion if you change the volume on an order - if you increase it, it changes the timestamp and hence you go to the back of the queue - if you decrease it though, you maintain your queue position. Hence to increase, add a new order don't increase the volume on an old one.
Updating a comment from 8 years ago...
This is no longer the case. Price data no longer goes through the CQG central infrastructure. In now goes directly to you.
Yeah, not trying to get "low latency" just worried about excessively high latency. I know its a problem for competitive online gaming so I thought it could be potentially problematic for click trading. Im thinking of scenarios where things are getting fast and furious and you're seeing signals on the order book to get out and the small lag in your data feed and the speed of your exit order traveling to Europe could potentially cost you 20 ticks. But that's just in theory, in practice I guess it doesn't seem to be a problem. Look at those Essex traders who cleaned up click trading on the CME all the way from the UK when oil went negative.
