News Blue Trading Systems Blog, Events, and Highlights

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Published: 04 January 2018

Blue Trading System’s is a family of traders, technologists, innovators and committed professionals. The women and men that work here want to build something that not only meets demand but advances the industry. We are sharp, loyal and strategic.

As we enter 2018, we wanted to highlight the people behind the name. These are the ones applying their knowledge, dedicating their time and investing their money in Blue Trading Systems. Throughout this year we invite you to learn more about the people building the solutions.

What is your name, title and responsibilities at Blue Trading Systems?

Trev Colvin, CEO, which in my case is a misnomer. I am the oldest and put in most of the money. I provide managerial and business guidance.

How did you get into this field of derivatives trading? Trader or technologist?

I defected from science to finance. Lucky me. It’s been great. I love the urgency. It’s exciting.

From your perspective, can you describe the relationship between BTS and its clients?

We genuinely care and try to give them better service than they ever thought they would get from a software vendor. I wish they would bug our offices so they could hear how we talk about customer service amongst ourselves. It’s a big deal.

How has BTS evolved since you started at the company?

We have acquired wisdom and character from humiliation.

What are a few challenges the industry is currently facing?

Dwindling volatility and figuring out which, if any, aspect of your intelligence will not become irrelevant when replaced by its superior artificial version.

What is your favorite piece of advice regarding trading, technology, the markets, leadership?

Figure out how to be your authentic self and develop your natural gifts instead of trying to prove something, to whom? Nobody cares.

If you had to pick, what animal would you be and why?

Buddha, because he is the highest form of animal I know.

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Published: 19 December 2017

From all of us at Blue Trading Systems, we wish you a happy and healthy holiday season. We had a great year, splitting time between enhancing our options system and developing our new futures spreader. It has been a pleasure to serve you. We look forward to continuing our partnership, working to help you keep your competitive edge sharp in 2018.

While you are always invited to visit us at BTS headquarters, we want to remind you that North Carolina winters make for risky travel conditions.

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Published: 14 December 2017

With the new year right around the corner, we are gearing up for a busy first quarter. We will be attending events organized by the Securities Traders Association of Chicago and the Futures Industry Association, enhancing our options trading platform, BTS Edge, and bringing our new futures trading solution, BTS Spark, to the market. Please read below if you are looking for information about our superior derivatives trading products or on where you can find us in the new year.

Event Attendance

As we look at the calendar of events for 2018, we are excited to plan for the Securities Traders Association of Chicago’s Mid-Winter Gathering in January. We will be attending the conference to gather information, meet with industry participants and hear what is going on in the world of trading and technology.

Later in the quarter we plan to attend the Futures Industry Association’s 43rd annual FIA Boca conference. This event brings together the industry’s most influential thought leaders to explore the current state of the cleared derivatives ecosystem. We look forward to catching up with our current partners as well as establishing new relationships.

BTS Edge

Next year we will also continue to enhance our options trading platform, BTS Edge. Our advanced trading system offers an intuitive user interface which both assists with trading decisions and scours the market for opportunities. The flexibility in setting volatility curves to reflect true market value leads to reliable prices and realistic, accurate risk reports. Together these tools provide a superior technological foundation for market makers, proprietary trading groups and brokers alike.

BTS Spark

In 2018, we will also be bringing our new futures trading solution to the production market. We developed BTS Spark due to market demands for more control over server hardware, better support from vendor partners and lower latency in the futures space. In fact, we are collaborating with Celoxica to offer an accelerated version of BTS Spark with expanded market coverage. The result is far less market data jitter through lower, deterministic latencies and superior overall trading performance.

Connecting

Next year, we will continue to help and support traders in the options space, expand our services to the futures market and further establish relationships with derivatives industry professionals. If you would like to learn more about Blue Trading Systems or meet up with us at STAC’s Mid-Winter Gathering or FIA Boca, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We look forward to connecting with you in 2018.

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Published: 05 December 2017

By Kevin Darby

I have a keen interest in industry developments that could give our clients an edge and John Lothian’s “Putting on My Broker Hat About Bitcoin” got me thinking about the imminent listing of Bitcoin futures at the CME and CBOE’s Chicago Futures Exchange. Crypto-mania commentary has focused on the merits of Bitcoin and how the associated technology might revolutionize finance and other aspects of our lives, but I do not see much earnest technical analysis of the system and its flaws.

An Overview

Note first that Bitcoin is neither currency nor commodity, but simply convention. In order for parties to exchange value, a transaction is processed following prescribed rules by a ‘node’ (participating computer) and added to the blockchain, a public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions since its origin. Later, convention dictates that other computers independently confirm that this transaction took place. Roughly 11,000 computers, located across the world (https://coinmap.org/#/world/39.50404071/-0.70312500/2) share this convention.

Participants in the transaction verification process are called ‘miners,’ though a more apt description might be ‘transaction verification agents.’ Miners are compensated both with fees deducted from each transaction and a lump-sum reward when a new block of transactions is added to the ledger, all denominated in Bitcoin. Miners either run a full node using their own specialized computer hardware or lend a piece of their existing computing power to a mining ‘pool’ in exchange for a pro-rata portion of that pool’s revenue.

A Question of Geography

Bitcoin touts itself as a decentralized payment network, but in practice, it’s not entirely egalitarian. A more internationally diversified network of ‘miners’ would add stability and reliability (https://blockchain.info/pools). Chinese mining pools currently dominate transaction verification, controlling more than 70% of the aggregate computing power. It’s important to note that while a pool may comprise thousands of individuals, a single pool administrator controls operating procedure, concentrating network authority in few hands. Also consider that many Chinese pools, for-profit enterprises, operate using government-subsidized electricity, exposing the network to foreign political risk.

A Question of Function

One wonders what might happen to Bitcoin if another of the ever-growing population of cryptocurrencies, possibly by becoming temporarily more profitable, diverted the attention of a large portion of the mining network away from Bitcoin. Just look back to the middle of November (https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=30days), when a technical conflict in the mining community regarding how to advance the underlying technology increased average transaction confirmation time to a peak of more than 20 hours. This days-long ordeal degraded network stability and more than tripled average fees from $6 to 20 USD (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#3m).

The vulnerability of the network to the whims of its mining pools represents an obstacle to widespread acceptance of Bitcoin as a trusted mechanism of exchange. Additionally, the current average fee of roughly $6 to send Bitcoin renders it unviable for small retail transactions.

A Question of Value

Bitcoin’s meteoric price rally has been accompanied by extreme volatility, with annualized averages between 70 and 80 percent, and frequent spikes over 100%, placing it more in the realm of risky assets than investment grade value stores. While our options trading clients would love more market volatility, assets whose prices evolve with 80 or 100 Vol are dicey. Bitcoin must stabilize before it will be considered by institutional investors. Proponents argue that listing futures on DCMs such as the CME and CFE will dampen price gyrations, but the loose federation of 20+ ‘cash markets’ underlying these derivatives is far from stable, producing a considerable replication challenge for would-be market makers.

Conclusion

Until some of the issues discussed above are resolved, it is difficult to classify Bitcoin as an asset. It is rather more of a convention or protocol that will probably yield interesting projects in the future, but it is a work in progress. I fully expect substantial revisions will be adopted to address Bitcoin’s serious problems: it is enforced by a relatively small, unaccountable, group of foreign operators, making network stability an issue; it’s too slow and expensive to compete with other domestic methods of money transfer; and its price is extremely volatile. It seems as if no one would opt to send money this way, yet hundreds of thousands of transactions, totalling billions of USD, take place every day.

All are curious to see how this month’s new futures contracts trade. Margining is tricky, and Mr. Peterffy’s well-articulated concerns about clearing segregation are sobering. It will be interesting to see the implied carry cost in how rolls are priced, and whether significant CBOE vs CME arbitrage opportunities arise.

Bitcoin is confusing because it differs so strikingly from more familiar asset classes. Of course, in our industry, this creates opportunity for those who see first how to resolve and exploit the confusion. In a couple years, we might well be unravelling how they figured it out, marveling at the fortunes they made, and wishing we too had been so smart.