Make finance closer to you by the American exchange
There is a sense that old, good times are already here, but20I remember that the US futures exchanges at the end of the century were incredibly enjoyable to visit. In large trading pits big enough to store jumbo jets, trades were conducted by people's hands everywhere. If you joined a tour, you could pass through a spot overlooking the noisy pit, and if you had a contact at the exchange, you could even walk right beside the pits where trades were being made. Now,CMEeven if you go to the CME, most trading is electronic, so you mainly see rows of servers, but a small portion, namely the trading of financial options, still gathers people in the pits, and at the moment the bell rings, a notably loud commotion rushes in.
I feel that the reason trading did not become big in Japan lies precisely here. Put simply, information traded on exchanges was widely available to the public (relatively) at low cost, and could be viewed through various media. From the perspective of data vendors, that was reflected in the price of using exchange data. For a long time, the London Stock Exchange data held the title of the world's most expensive information, but one day it relinquished that seat without ceremony. The high price astonished the world, and the business model of those who dealt with it collapsed. In the world, the stance was: “Please trade using our data; we will provide the venue.” However, as electronic trading became central to trading, that trading information itself gained value and began to stand on its own. In the past, US futures data could be used at a low price, but at a certain point manufacturers began to charge licensing and usage fees, and even users themselves started to be billed.
The flow of people who had booths at the Chicago industry show held once a year, which I mentioned last time, used to be dominated by global banks, but gradually large brokers worldwide grew, and now exchanges, platform vendors handling those trades, and companies handling the infrastructure have become central. The big players that moved on to another world were those dealing with foreign exchange, and educational institutions and book publishers that studied their derivatives. What used to be events attracting a variety of global participants have, before we knew it, turned into gatherings of a small world. I found the party of CME at the show this time, so I’m posting a photo. If I find it, maybe even older photos will come out again.
In a world where electronic trading is ordinary and ordinary people can place orders directly with the exchange through a securities company, what exchanges can do is to develop as attractive products as possible, break down various barriers, and create an environment where many people can trade freely. Otherwise, there may be no further development. That is why,Bitcoinfeels like the birth of a “new currency” (Next time: screening and system trading).
