Anonymous, huge amount, where the "Goldman Sachs" in the currency circle is screaming and making a fortune?

Author: nealwen

Source: WOOTRAD

According to CoinMarketCap, there are more than 3,000 cryptocurrencies, more than 20,000 trading pairs, and 7×24 hours. I don't know what to buy, it doesn't matter. The currency circle has always been a kind of investment method – buying and selling. Whether it's WeChat, the big investment V on Weibo, or some of the market-specific apps that offer the ability to follow the order, the amaranths are staring at these “star” investors, mimicking their trading trajectory operations. In the currency circle, this became the business of these big singles, but in the US stock market in the 1990s, the most famous trading V, Goldman Sachs, was annoyed because of the “documentary”.

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A single function push message of a market software

Thirty years ago, market makers were the main competitors of US stock traders, and they listed the price of the sale and purchase on the secondary quotation system. Traders can clearly see the number of purchase and sale orders, the price of pending orders, and the time of pending orders . Goldman Sachs, as a dominant market maker at the time, almost every order was watched by everyone, and no traders chose to “righteous” with Goldman Sachs. In other words, what Goldman Sachs buys, what everyone buys, what Goldman Sachs sells, and what everyone sells. This kind of “by-single” has annoyed Goldman Sachs, and it is difficult to make a large number of orders.

US stock second-tier quotation system in the 1990s [1]

The “GSCO” marked on the right red circle is the market maker code of Goldman's Sachs. “91 11/16” represents the order time on November 16, 1991. “10” means Goldman Sachs wants to sell 1000 shares of SUNW. stock. The red circle at the bottom left is an order to buy 5,500 shares of SUNW from Instinet dark pool exchange (INCA), the world's first computerized dark pool trading platform, which is also the entire secondary quotation system. The largest order.

Dark pools refer to trading platforms operated by private institutions outside public exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Institutions and block traders can trade stocks, derivatives and other financial products on the dark pool in an anonymous and hidden order , with 40% of the US stock market trading in dark pools.

Comparison of dark pool/NYSE/Nasdaq/Baz trading volume in 2011~14 [2]

With the dark pool of anonymity and high liquidity, Goldman Sachs is no longer worried about being singled out. This is the secret that Goldman Sachs can sell 20 million S&P ETF500 (SPY) without affecting the market. Goldman Sachs may not have to announce any transactions until all the sell orders it has sold are fully completed, as shown in the image below. Normally open transactions are sorted by price and chronological order, while the 500,000 “182.7” sell orders marked on the right red circle are higher than the previous and the same transaction price, which happens to be the highest price of the day, which is through the dark pool. Complete the transaction. Transactions in the dark pool are often not announced immediately, and some will even be published the next day.

A delayed release of the S&P 500 ETF's sell order [3]

Later, Goldman Sachs simply developed the dark pool and did more than one. In May 2017, Goldman Sachs released a new dark pool Sigma X2, which was handed over to Nasdaq for the technology, operations and regulation of the NASDAQ exchange. The liquidity of the dark pool is provided by Goldman Sachs' high-frequency strategy. The average daily transaction volume of the Sigma X2 dark pool in October 2019 is more than $3 billion [4]. What is the concept? The average daily trading volume of a head cryptocurrency exchange is around $1 billion [5], which is only one-third of Sigma X2. In addition to the Sigma X2 released in the US, Goldman Sachs also has SIGMA X MTF in Europe, SIGMA X Japan, SIGMA X Hong Kong and SIGMA X Australia, for a total of 5 dark pool platforms.

Goldman Sachs dark pool product Sigma X MTF slogan: superior liquidity / improved transaction quality / secure trading environment / anonymous / efficient access

As the world's largest financial market, the size of the US stock market is far beyond the current cryptocurrency market, but the logic of trading to make money and the problems in the market are similar. The active VAT players are not the main force that dominates the direction of cryptocurrency transactions. The real coin circle “Goldman Sachs” are also reluctant to see competitors and retail investors see their trading trajectories in advance. Similar requirements have spawned a similar cryptocurrency dark pool product:

– Kraken has been offering customers a dark pool trading facility for an additional fee since 2015; Bitfinex also offers similar services to its customers;

– In 2016, broker TradeZero teamed up with Bitcoin pioneer Jered Kenna to launch a dark pool trading tool;

– In 2018, the Republican Dark Pool agreement to raise $33.8 million;

– In 2019, the dark pool platform WOOTRAD, which was incubated by the quantitative investment institution Kronos, received investment from 12 star institutions including DFund, Distributed Capital and SNZ.

In contrast to the dark pool development of the US stock market, it is foreseeable that the dark pool of cryptocurrency will be a new blue ocean, but the real dark pool products on the market are rare. Kronos & WOOTRADE co-founder Jack Tan believes that the technical threshold required to establish and maintain dark pools may be a rare cause in China.

In addition to the high technical threshold, the dark pool is also facing huge regulatory risks. Since 2011, due to improper operations involving dark pool transactions, the relevant banks and brokers have been charged more than $230 million in fines by the US SEC [6], and the voice of the opposition to the dark pool has also intensified.

What is wrong with the traditional dark pool? And in the cryptocurrency industry under stronger supervision, how should the dark pool be independent?

Reference materials:

[1] [3] “Developments that led to the emergence of the Dark Pool”, Nov 25, 2016, Stefanie Kammerman

[2] “Dark pools”, Jul 21, 2017, Bloomberg

[4] “Sigma X2 Monthly Metric”, Oct, 2019, Goldman Sachs

[5] Blockchain Transparency Institute

[6] "Wall Street's Dark Pools Get Transparency Makeover", Jul 18, 2018, The Wall Street Journal

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