Cornering The Market

Trading and Electronic Markets: What Investment Professionals Need to Know

The true meaning of investment discipline is to trade only when you rationally expect that you will achieve your desired objective. Accordingly, managers must thoroughly understand why they trade. Because trading is a zero-sum game, good investment discipline also requires that managers understand why their counterparties trade. This book surveys the many reasons why people trade and identifies the implications of the zero-sum game for investment discipline. It also identifies the origins of liquidity and thus of transaction costs, as well as when active investment strategies are profitable. The book then explains how managers must measure and control transaction costs to perform well. Electronic trading systems and electronic trading strategies now dominate trading in exchange markets throughout the world. The book identifies why speed is of such great importance to electronic traders, how they obtain it, and the trading strategies they use to exploit it. Finally, the book analyzes many issues associated with electronic trading that currently concern practitioners and regulators.

The Futures

In The Futures, Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which together comprised the original, most bustling futures market in the world. She details the emergence of the futures business as a kind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequent transformation into a sophisticated electronic market where contracts are traded at lightning-fast speeds. Lambert also details the disastrous effects of Wall Street's adoption of the futures contract without the rules and close-knit social bonds that had made trading it in Chicago work so well. Ultimately Lambert argues that the futures markets are the real "free" markets and that speculators, far from being mere parasites, can serve a vital economic and social function given the right architecture. The traditional futures market, she explains, because of its written and cultural limits, can serve as a useful example for how markets ought to work and become a tonic for our current financial ills.

Report of the Federal Trade Commission on the Grain Trade