 | | | | | | | | January 30, 2025 | | | |  | Jeff Bergstrom
Editor
John Lothian News | |
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| | | | Lead Stories | | | Trader Mints Millions in Hours on Bond Options Bet Tied to Fed; Bearish 10-year note hedge bought pre-Fed, expired at close; Bond drop post-Fed boosted position, which cost $2.3 million
Edward Bolingbroke - Bloomberg
A bond trader appears to have hit the jackpot on a one-day options bet that Treasury yields would climb Wednesday after the Federal Reserve's decision, potentially raking in millions of dollars in profits. The position was in the so-called Treasury 'Weekly' options, which are short-term expiries designed to cover key market-moving risk events. It likely wasn't the only such bearish options bet placed on the day, but the size stands out. The trader spent about $2.3 million in premium on the bearish hedge, bought at a price of 3 ticks a few minutes before 11:30 a.m. New York time Wednesday.
/jlne.ws/4hhbcDM
BlockFills Collaborates with CoinDesk Indices to Bring Institutional-Grade Options Market Liquidity to the CoinDesk 20 Index
BlockFills
BlockFills, a leading digital assets technology and trading firm for institutions and professional traders, today announced a collaboration with CoinDesk Indices to introduce the BlockFills CoinDesk 20 Options Market and bring professional liquidity to the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20). CoinDesk 20 measures the performance of leading digital assets and applies a capped market capitalization weighted methodology to ensure portfolio diversification. Trading on the BlockFills CoinDesk 20 Options Market began this month with the first transaction initiated by Hyperion Decimus, a prominent digital asset manager and multi-strategy crypto hedge fund.
/jlne.ws/3EiJpV5
Options Traders Brace for Volatility in India's Bank Stocks Ahead of Budget
Ashutosh Joshi - Bloomberg
As India's budget nears, banking stocks have become a focal point for options traders. The cost of hedging against swings in the Nifty Bank Index is near its highest level since June's elections. This exceeds similar bets on the Nifty 50 Index, signaling expectations of heightened volatility. The Nifty Bank gauge has moved an average of 1.8% on budget days over the last decade, compared to 1.1% for Nifty.
/jlne.ws/40Vi8kr
Trump crypto coins a sign of 'speculative frenzy' in markets, famed short seller says
Ines Ferre - Yahoo Finance
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump's new meme coins are drawing skepticism from some prominent investors - even those betting against the market. One famed short seller told Yahoo Finance this week that he'll steer clear of meme tokens. "These things have no intrinsic value. They're just barometers of how much liquidity is out there, how much speculative frenzy is out there," Carson Block, founder and chief investment officer of Muddy Waters Capital said in an interview with Yahoo Finance last week. "Right now, all the signals are reading there's a lot."
/jlne.ws/4jGCZiP
US block size changes reveal trillions in swaps trading; Fears of information leakage force some large buy-side users to adjust execution strategy
Ben St. Clair - Risk.net
Changes to trade reporting rules have shone a light on large US interest rate derivatives trades, but also forced some prominent buy-side swaps users to change the way they transact large notional positions. Trades above block size in the US benefit from a reporting delay to data repositories, a waiver from requirements to put dealers into competition, and sometimes a cap on notionals reported publicly.
/jlne.ws/40wwDJY
| | | | | | Exchanges | | | Xetra ETF & ETP statistics 2024: assets under management and product diversity continue to grow
Deutsche Borse
Deutsche Borse's Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) segment continued its growth trajectory last year, reaching a new all-time high with assets under management of EUR1.83 trillion (+33.9 per cent; December 2023: EUR1.36 trillion). At the same time, the trading volume in ETFs and ETPs on Xetra rose significantly by 28 per cent to EUR230.8 billion (2023: EUR180.4 billion). Trading in non-euro currencies achieved a particularly high growth rate of 82.9 per cent to 1.81 billion euros (2023: 989 million euros). In total, Deutsche Borse now offers 180 ETFs and ETPs in other trading currencies such as the US dollar and British pound.
/jlne.ws/3PUSCVU
| | | | | | Regulation & Enforcement | | | Federal Court Orders International Enterprise to Pay Over $451 Million for Global Binary Options Fraud
CFTC
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission today announced the U.S. District Court for Northern District of Illinois issued an order of default judgment against five offshore entities and three individuals, finding them liable for fraud and other violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations in connection with a global retail binary options fraud that victimized U.S. residents. The defendants executed their unlawful scheme through internet websites using fictitious trade names such as BigOption, BinaryBook, and BinaryOnline.
/jlne.ws/40FtLux
| | | | | | Technology | | | OpenAI Doesn't Want AI Cheaters; Distillation, shorts, private company tokenization, Trumpcoin for payments and sportsbook correlation desks.
Matt Levine - Bloomberg Opinion
DeepSeek distillation: As a person who writes columns on the internet, I have a lot of sympathy for both sides of the artificial intelligence copyright debate: If you publish words on the internet, you have some proprietary rights to them. If somebody else just took my columns and republished them, under their own name, without credit to me, and sold ads or subscriptions against them, I would be annoyed. If somebody stole my ideas and changed the wording a little, and then republished them in slightly modified form, I would be equally - maybe more - annoyed.
/jlne.ws/40zGUVH
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